Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When she comes to him on the eve of the finals, he can't really do much more than laugh.

"So, you were alive all along," he says. It feels like such a mirror of what they were before. He could die tomorrow. She's here to distract him.

It feels awful.

Jun Kazama, as she was twenty years ago—or close enough to it she might as well be a ghost, and he's not entirely sure she's not—walks behind him, puts her hands over his chest. He ought to call his guards. Tell Nina to kill her and leave her body outside the door. Let Jin see it and cry and hate him all the more.

But he doesn't. He's afraid to even ask how she got into his hotel room.

"Kazuya...." She wraps her arms around him from behind. Her touch grazes his chest, and he sucks in a breath  under her hands. His body has changed since their last encounter, but the path she traces—his first scar and the most painful—hasn't. She remembers the outline of it.

He wants to throw up. He wants to laugh. He wants to cry. She has a talent for making him absolutely crazy.

"So, you're on the boy's side, I take it," he says. She says nothing.

"I know you are, or you would have come sooner." Anger is a comforting emotion, one quick to find his side. He presses his face to the glass, and he does so purposefully; if he stares out and doesn't see her reflection, he'll know for sure that she's a ghost.

He doesn't want her to be a ghost.

He does.

He doesn't.

He doesn't know.

"You didn't come back to me on Yakushima," she says, her voice almost teasing. That's how he would describe it, if he didn't know better. "I don't think you get to be so offended by me being late now, Kazuya."

"I couldn't," he said, crisply. "I was dead for quite a bit of time, you know."

"Me too," she says, still teasing. He turns around and looks at her. She is solid enough. He reaches his hand outward, grabs her cheek. She doesn't flinch. 

And his hand does not pass through her.

So strong. So strong.

"I told you I would love you always," she says, and leans into his touch. "That hasn't changed, my love."

"Everything has changed." His hand goes lower, grazes the lovely skin of her neck. He could kill her. He should kill her; she's the only woman who can remove his powers in all the world, and the boy—the boy. 

"You won't love me tomorrow," he says. "With what I have to do." And he will focus on that tonight. Tomorrow, he will murder his son.

He does not particularly relish it. It's not like with Heihachi; the boy has never done him that badly by existing. But it is the only way to take back what he needs to be complete, and the boy won't allow him to have it any other way, so... It is the way of things in their family. It would always end up this way, he tells himself.

It's a lie he almost believes.

"I will. Kazamas never break their promises, Kazuya Mishima. And I promised to always love you." She smiles sadly. "I always hoped you would meet him."

"You must be very proud of us," he intones, his voice all vicious mockery.

"No," she says with a sigh. "But I understand, Kazuya."

"You can't," he says, his voice a soft whisper. She's not Mishima, not really. Didn't grow up with it, like his mother did.  She leans up to kiss him, and he blocks the kiss with his palm. "Not this time."

"What?" She's confused; he blinks and tilts his head. Could a ghost be confused? He sits down on his bed.

"You're psychic, I do think you can figure it out. I'm not having you seal my powers before a fight, again." He glares at her. "Did you even mourn me?" 

It's an old hurt. But he feels it regardless.

She moves with him, follows him down to the bed. She sits on it and she feels real enough, feels like a flesh and blood woman. Her body even indents his bed. "I did," she says. "Every day. Every day of my life, I have mourned you." Present tense, he notices. "Living without you was like..." Her breath is shaky, and he watches, fascinated, as she tries to gather a breath. Past tense. "It was like living underwater, Kazuya. Always trying to chase oxygen that wasn't there. Constantly starving."  

His nostrils flare but he says nothing; he is still angry. He still has not forgiven her, not for her sealing his powers, not for making him care about her. He could have won that fight if he wasn't so damn distracted, and with her—he never is undistracted. She makes him weak.

And last time, he lost everything.

But even knowing that, it doesn't kill the affection in his heart, and it is such a terrible affliction.

"And for the record, I didn't...I didn't know I was sealing your powers. I was still a kid, then, you know." She flexes one hand out, her ki spark no less beautiful than it was twenty years ago. 

"You still look like a kid now, you know," he says, sarcastic. "And I don't think it matters, do you? What your intention was? I still died. It wasn't pleasant, and I was—" the word terrified burns in his throat, and this time the word does not come. "Alone." He stares at her, and he thinks: I should kill her.

But does he make a move? No. He keeps his hands on his chest, and he tells himself he is not protecting his heart, that he is just resting it there. He is also, annoyingly, old enough to know it's a lie.

 But the anger comes to him easy, and he can keep it up. It's the main emotion he knows. So he just glares at her.

"I know," she says, soft. "God, Kazuya, I know. And when I think of what happened to you after." She starts to cry, her shoulders shaking. "There's so much pain..."

"I know," he drawls. "I was there."

She holds out a hand, gently wants to take his. But he does not take hers, and she sighs. "Oh, Kazuya."

"What's done is done, Kazama." Cold, but this time—this time he will do what he should have done twenty years ago. He will send her away. Let her tell the boy not to kill him, perhaps she can seal his demon long enough Kazuya can snap his neck. "Leave. Go comfort your son on his upcoming death."

"Our son." He grimaces; she flops down next to him. "We made him last time we were in this situation, you know."

"I know," he says. "And it was the biggest mistake of my life." Certainly the tallest mistake; the little shit's grown an inch on him. But then, Jin’s mother was always tall, too.

"You don't mean that," she says, and he just raises his eyebrows. Yes. Yes he does. Jin Kazama has stopped him from achieving what he wants for years now on his stupid self-sacrificial self-hatred journey, or whatever it is their idiot child thinks he's doing.

"You forget I see in your heart." She smiles. "I know you thought of me."

"Often. But not all those thoughts were lovey-dovey, J...Kazama."

"Enough were." She's teasing him, a little smile on her face. That's something he's forgotten about her; she always did have fire in her, the ability to confront him and push back on him. "And there was a time when you wondered what our child might look like. You wanted him to have my eyes. You got your wish." She gives him one of her most infuriating little smiles. It's as lovely as it is ruinous. "Not much else of me in his features, though."

"No," he admits. "Not much else of you at all. He's all Mishima in everything but name." He probably should just give the stupid child that name; muddy the waters a bit. Would people think Jin a savior if they knew the boy was the fruit of their demon's own loins?

He'd always thought it was obvious, anyway. 

"He has enough of me. He doesn't want this confrontation, either. Not really." She smiles sadly, and if he were still a younger man, it would work on him. But they both got old, long ago.  "I know his heart as well as I know yours, Kazuya."

"He has a funny way of showing it." Was this not the boy who had just pointed his fist at him and mouthed soon when it was announced they'd be in the final battle of the tournament against one another? "Besides, it's a bit late to start doing father-son camping trips, don't you think?"

"Never too late," she says, the ghost of a smile on her face as she wiggles closer to him. "And he does like to go camping. For the record."

"I'm sure he'll accept my invitation right away," he drawls, full sarcasm. She frowns. Her hand reaches out and he notices for the first time that it's gloved. An obvious detail to miss. He frowns. Weak.

"Are those for—?" He asks; she nods.

"I will meet you where you are, Kazuya," she whispers. Her hand ever-so-gently touches his, so softly he feels she must be a ghost. But then the hand tightens over his own, and his Adam’s apple bobs with discomfort. It is a strong hold. She was always strong. Stronger than him. 

"I saw him in you. You can't imagine how often. He'd smile at me, and I'd see you staring back."  She smiles at him; she's too close to him. He should tell her to go. "Do you know what I pledged when he was born, Kazuya?"

"How could I?" he says. "I was dead." He doesn't say it with nearly enough acid on his tongue, and the squeeze of her hand on his tells him he's falling back into her.

She still terrifies the shit out of him.

"I said, this is our second chance, yours and mine. I said: Jin will grow up and he will have everything his father did not. He will have love. He will have praise. He will never doubt for a single second that both his parents loved him. I couldn't save Kazuya, but I can save his son. That was my pledge."

"I doubt his father loved—"

"You don't, not really." She glares at him; it is the first flash of frustration he’s seen on her face in years, and it takes him so far into the past she may as well have uppercutted him clean into it. "Stop trying to pretend you're heartless. I have never been fooled by it. You've never been as good at hiding yourself away as you think you are."

And it is true and it is not. He has told himself he has no heart so many times.

But she always sees through it.

And tonight...He really can't afford for her to.

"Go, Jun," he mutters. "It's too late for this mercy mission of yours."

"You always loved him. Your first thought when you found out about him—you remember what it was?"

"No." A lie. He does remember. But he doesn't want to.

"Ah, he never knew me." She smirks as her voice goes low, an imitation of himself he'd find cute if the stakes were lower than they are now. "This is the greatest gift I can give him. To not know me." She smiles sadly, squeezes his hand. "He won't know about the Mishima curse..."

"And what a lot of good that thought did. The very second I met the brat, he told me the world would be better if I weren't in it. He's not you, Jun. There's too much of me in there." And who was he at Jin's age? No less murderous, no less vengeful. Jin's reasons were worse, perhaps, but blood was blood. Jinpachi had been kind to his father so far as he knew and look where that had gotten him.

It was the nature of the Mishima clan. Blood. Battle. Survival. Only the strongest would walk away.

And that was all that mattered.

"It still shows your feelings weren't negative for him, once. You didn't hate him on first breath. You were afraid for him. You wondered—" He heard the hope in her voice.

"It doesn't matter what I thought, then! It was two years ago! And if you were there, you know—" He cursed and looked away. How much had he once hoped in his foolish younger years that—that she could be alive?  That he would go to Yakushima once he'd finally escaped G-Corp, and she would be there, her black hair tucked behind her ear as she smiled at him and welcomed him? 

He had gone there, finally, on the eve of the fourth tournament. It had been the first time he had seen the sun in almost twenty years.

But there had only been ashes.  He had waited a long time for her ghost then.

She hadn't come.

"I was there on Yakushima. And I was with you in Hon-Maru, too.  I know you fought. And I know he got lucky to win." She smiles, and he looks at her.

"Don't patronize me," he says sharply, glaring at her. "I lost because of my own mistakes."

"You lost because you were upset, Kazuya. You were just reunited with your father and son after twenty years apart." Her hand slowly moves up his arm; he lets her, sadness in his eyes. "And you, Kazuya, as I have said, are not so emotionless as you always—"

"I am," he says slowly. "Ask your son what my emotions are. Why aren't you visiting him, Jun?"

"How do you know I'm not?" She smiles at him, her touch teasing as her fingers graze his throat.

"Well," he acknowledges. "I don't. I wasn't the psychic one." Where are you, Jun? That you can project yourself so solidly to me.  

"I know," she says. "And I am here." 

"And since you are...." He gently plucks her strong little hand away from him. "You should know. Everything that happens—has been preordained. It is the way of the house of Mishima. We have never been able to stand one another for more than thirty seconds." Look at Lars. Half-European floppy haired bastard has head-butted his way in to fighting him and Jin both three times and even Heihachi twice.

"Except your father and his father. Jinpachi loved and doted on Heihachi."

"And look where it got grandfather. He starved to death under Hon Maru, you know. On my father's orders. It wasn't a kind death. We could hear him lingering for weeks. I couldn't take it. I tried to give him water. I was beaten within half an inch of my life."

And he remembers every blow.  

"My mother thought I slipped and fell," he says, bitterly. She hadn't wanted to see the signs.

And it had gotten so much worse after she died.

Jun is quiet for a long moment, and shifts even closer to him, her eyes lit with so much pain. His own pain, reflected back to him. 

"Can I hug you?" She asks. He laughs but does not answer.

The sense of deja vu just about knocks him over.

What a sick joke.

She puts her arms around his neck and he does tense. "I liked this better the first time," he says, then his stomach turns. He did. But those times are done.

"We can do that, if you want, but you said you didn't want me to seal your powers." She smiles. "I have better control now, though. I know what I'm doing."

"Jun..." He gives her a little glare, albeit one that probably would have worked better if she wasn't on top of him, cuddled up with him in bed. "Our moment has passed."

"Our moment is forever," she says. She runs her hand over his cheek. "We have a son. You and I will always be linked, Kazuya. And is there truly nothing left of the boy who told me he loved me in there?"

"You're psychic," he grinds out. "Why ask me questions you already know the answer to?"

"I am trying to help you focus your mind." Her hand, gently, lands on top of his heart. "Kazuya..."

He leans toward her, their lips a mere inch from one another. It would be so easy. It would be so easy to kiss her, to fall into her, to die for her again.

And it is—it is so terrifying to know that. She has completely captured him. He has to fight it.

He doesn't want to fight it. 

"You were always a distraction," he snarls and pushes her away from him. It's a weak push. She doesn't run.

"...Do you love me, Kazuya?" She asks. He looks away.

"...Dammit, woman."

"Kazuya...Please. Who are we now if we cannot be honest with one another?" He should not turn to her. Every damn fiber in his being knows it's the wrong decision. But he does. He turns and he presses his head against hers; she gasps quietly against his mouth and he smirks. He can still surprise her.

"Yes," He hisses. Then he laughs, and it sounds maniacal, even to his ears.  "But I wish I didn't. It would be so much simpler."

It's been twenty years and he has never been able to blot out the stain she inflicted on him. His love for her has always lingered. There hasn't been a single person in her absence, and he's more than had the power to find another.

Jun wraps her arms tight around him and he's surprised how fast it is for his arms to slide around her. Dangerous. Deadly. But ultimately, he cannot resist her.

She was always so much stronger.

"A part of me will always wish it had been different." He mumbles into her; always his confessor, Jun Kazama, and she slowly strokes at his hair. And it is, damnably, comforting. "You don't know..."

"I do know, because I wanted it too." She smiles. "Every day since we were last here, Kazuya. I wanted it, too. I still do." She smiles at him, one of those precious smiles that tells him all things are possible in her.

But he has seen that smile before. And it hadn't happened then. He'd died. And she'd grown into a mother without him, raised a child who he barely knew.

A boy who was now a full adult. Her son. And perhaps, in a distant way, his.

"You could still know him," she says; he rolls his eyes.

"It's not an avenue the boy is interested in, Kazama." Or you, surely? The demon murmurs; he doesn't answer.

He doesn't know. He never knew anything about being a father. He always thought the bloodline would die with him. He hadn't known, then, how many bastards his father had had.

And it had been before he’d fathered a child with...her.

"Jun," she says, and touches his lip. "Call me Jun. I like it when you say my name."

"Jun," he admits.

Her smile in response is warming, sweet in all the ways that make him happy but have always led to danger.

"Can I kiss you...?" She whispers. 

His gaze flickers toward her.

"Will it...?" Tell her no! What are you doing?! 

"For a little bit. Ten minutes. An hour, maybe. If it's a particularly good kiss. ...I do remember you being a very good kisser, Kazuya." Another thing he's forgotten: she is seductive as sin itself. It is an odd trait. She has always come across as so innocent. So sweet. But a mere flip of her hand, a twirl of her skirt, the slightest mention of sex...and she evokes things he thought he'd moved past long ago.

He does want to kiss her. But he is 50 now. Nearly as old as his father had been in the first tournament. The physical urges are not what they had once been, and he has gotten too used to not having the absolution she used to give him.

He sighs.

He does not like feeling like Heihachi. He does not like feeling a single jolt of sympathy for the old man, dealing with an annoying whelp of a boy he never understood,  waiting for the night to pass so he could murder the last vestige of a woman he loved. He blinks away what he tells himself is not a tear, though it is. 

"No." No, he does not want to delve down into the past, not anymore.

Her face falls. "Kazuya..." She sounds near tears again, and her hold on him grows tighter.

"You're not even really here." He is channeling his anger now; it comes, fast and heady. "How can you say you love me?" He asks, and if his voice sounds raw, then so be it. He feels raw, a gift she had always had that is growing more annoying as they grow older. "If you loved me, you would have come sooner. You would have been at my side the second you could. But you have always appeared to the boy. Not to me." 

"I wish I could be with you," she whispers, and he hates that answer. He wants—he wants answers. "And I tried. I tried to talk to you both. But you couldn't see me. I yelled at you for hours on Yakushima. You offered me a rose. White. And I kept saying, I'm here but—"

He swallows. Yes. He does remember that.

"Where are you, really?" He murmurs. "Physically." Why did it matter?

After the boy, he thinks, perhaps...he will find her. If there is an after the boy.

"I don't know," she admits, her own voice scratchy. "But I know where I want to be."

He strokes her hair and sees a tear fall from her cheek.

"You would choose me, then? Over your own blood? Your son?"

"He is our blood. Yours and mine." She presses her face up against his, and he closes his eyes.  "It's not a competition between you. I love you both."

"It is a competition. A fight to the death. One of us leaves tomorrow Jun." He runs his finger over her lip. Despite her strength—and she is plenty strong—it quivers. "Would you still love me if...?"

"Always." The answer is immediate and strong. "Even if you follow your father into committing filicide..." She shivers. "I will still be yours. I will be angry with you, I will hate that you did it for the rest of your life and long after you die but....I will still love you. "

"Will you appear to me?" He asks, his voice strangely frail, even to his own ears. "Chase me like this?"

"If you want. If I can." Non-committal. As always. "I don't—" Her image fades slightly. Distress? "I would want to." 

He squeezes her tighter to him. "Don't go," he says. It is the closest he will ever get to telling her that he missed her. "It's lonely, without you."

He offers her a sad half-smile. Her image fades for a moment, then comes back strong.  Whatever connection they have...is it fading? He leans inward and, despite every noise in his mind telling him it is an absolutely terrible idea, he leans forward and kisses her. He will do that much. If this is...the end.

It is chaste; closed mouth. The demon falls silent anyway. She leans into him, and him into her.

"Stay," he says. "I love you." He can say it now. Twenty god damn years haven’t made it easier, but he can say it. Looking at her, even.

"Nothing would make me happier." A beat. Her cheeks flush. "That kiss made me happy, too. You're still a good kisser, Kazuya Mishima."

"I haven't practiced," he mumbles. Her hand gently fiddles with his belt buckle, and she looks up at him, eyes shining. Full of love.

"I haven't either, but...I understand more now. Let me show you."

"We aren't—" He clears his throat, but he doesn't attempt to stop her nimble fingers as her hands flick his belt open, as easily as if she is really there.

"Let me show my love for you," she murmurs. "If it's this way—I won't take anything away." A beat. "Except perhaps a bit of stress from your shoulders." A smile.

A very beautiful smile.

"Fine," he says. "But I won't kiss you again."

Another smile; beautiful, but, he thinks, melancholy. He is older now, but her power over him is still the same. Her little fingers, even in her gloves, slowly unbuttoning his pants, slowly pulling his fly down. The anticipation makes him shiver like the scared young man he'd been once, the first time. He looks at her face. She is, as usual, stunning.

He doesn't need a lot of encouragement to grow harder under her fingers; it's been decades since he's been touched there but she remembers, and she flushes as he rises up into her fingertips.

"Stop blushing," he mutters. "You know what you do to me, woman."

She smiles. "I do. I remember." He leans his head on her shoulder and closes his eyes. He is here, an old, lonely man in a spartan room; he is also there, twenty years in the past, shaking as a gentle woman slowly moves her hand back and forth in the most torrid affair he's ever had in his office. In his life. You're not scary, she murmured then. You're not a monster. You're just a human. One who badly needs to feel...

He gasps into her shoulder; he turns toward her, seeking more contact. Throws his leg half over hers, as if he can anchor her down to this bed, will her not to float away. She nuzzles into him. “Kazuya…”

Again she can throw him into the past with little more than a whisper of his name, and a soft tug of her hand.

You need to feel... Her eyes, then, had been a holy thing, and they were no less profane to him now.

"Jun..." He mutters, and he wants so badly to kiss her. He buries his lips into her neck instead and feels the twitch of her muscles in her cheek as she smiles.

"You're beautiful, Kazuya," she mutters. "I love to see you like this."

"How..." He whimpers into her shoulder; her hand is speeding up now, and he can barely form words. There is nothing left to them but the most elemental, and this is something they have always been good at.

"The way you are," she says, rubbing her nose against his. "Stubborn. Trying so hard not to show your humanity. It peeking through anyway."

“H-hhm.” He doesn’t have words for it, really; there’s very little he’s thinking about but the rhythm between them, and how badly he wishes that it could be a more complete union than this.  

“Haa,” she whispers against him, her body rocking with his. She still feels it too. His hips join her in moving, the need absolutely overwhelming. A part of him hates that he is so weak, so desperate for this. Another part of him, knows it has been a very long time since he has been touched with any kind of tenderness and that when it comes to her – he is still powerless.

Literally and figuratively.

It is ironic, isn’t it? The weakest part of him is always the strongest. It always wins out in the end.

He gasps, ragged, into her shoulder. "Woman," he growls.

"Hm?" Her hand moves faster, getting almost overwhelming now, he almost bites down on her shoulder—except he knows, too well, where getting her blood in his teeth would get them.

"Lose the glove," he rasps. He wants to touch her. He wants to touch her so badly. He runs one hand under her blouse; he isn’t coordinated enough to undo it with her distracting hand.

Her skin is no longer so flawless – he feels the ridges of stretch marks under his fingers – but it is still beautiful.

She breaks away for a second, pulling off her glove. He looks at her, knowing he looks detestably weak, and she—she smiles at him, like how he looks is even slightly attractive—and then her hand is  back, and bare, and the groan he makes into her shoulder can barely be called human. Her hand is slick with him now, and it’s been too long. He will not last very long in this.

“Shh,” she says, softly. “It’s okay.” She is so warm, all of her so damn warm, and he is begging for it, wordlessly begging for it... He whines into her shoulder.

"Look at me," she murmurs. "Look at me."

He ignores her request, this time; he is here and he is not-here, he is not responsive, whimpers to himself that this is only physical release, nothing more—that if he tries hard enough, he can believe the lie, still.

But he can’t.

"Kazuya," she whispers. "Please."

And then, even knowing full well it will ruin him, he does. He looks up, and she sees him, and she sees him. Sees through him. Sees everything he'd ever been, and everything he will be.

She does not look away.

"I see you," she murmurs. "I see you."

And there is no power on earth that can  stop him from kissing her as he reaches his release, his groan swallowed by her hungry mouth. She is an endless maw, she is certain death and she is, paradoxically, his very life. She holds him through every last shiver, kissing him tenderly.

And he hates how much he loves her.

"You kissed me. Next time," she murmurs. "You'll make me—" 

"After the boy..." He says, and it is a promise. He will find her then. If she is..."Are you alive?" He asks directly, half afraid of the answer.

"What does your heart tell you?" She taps at his heart with her ungloved hand, and he sighs. An answer, but not a complete one.

"It tells me you live," he admits. But it only does so because he is terrified of the answer being that she does not. "Must you always speak in riddles?"

"Must you always hide yourself away in your shell and make me pry it open?" She giggles, still girlish after all these damn years, and cuddles him close. "My little oyster."

"...Don't call me that," he mutters, and she does the only decent thing she's done all night and ignores the bright blush of afterglow that colors his cheeks.

He stares hard at her, trying to find context clues to where she can be. He finds none.

"You doubt so much," She whispers. He looks away.

"I'm too old to believe in miracles anymore, Jun." He pushes himself off the bed, busies himself with tiding up the proof of his release a bit. That done, he walks back to the window and purposefully doesn’t look at her. He gazes out into the courtyard; Jin is there. He doesn’t call her attention to it, but she must know, because she is behind him a second later.

And he never heard her footfall.

"Miracles are always longshots. But that doesn’t mean they can’t happen, Kazuya. And you’re so stubborn. If anyone could..." She shivers. "Nothing could stop you."

"Your son—"

"Our son." She shoots him a glance; she doesn’t like the way he refers to Jin.

"Our son,” he acquiesces. It fixes nothing of the problem, he thinks, to call the boy that. He grunts. "I don't even know him, Jun."

"Then I will tell you about him. His birthday is the fifth of August," she says. "Blood type AB.”

Same as his. He closes his eyes and sighs.

“When he was a baby, he had a favorite teddy bear that he slept with for the first three years of his life. Always holding so tight to it. Like he was afraid to lose it." He swallows, not wanting to hear this.

But Jun Kazama has no mercy for him.

"It got so worn down, you know. I had to sew it shut so many times. Threadbare. But he wanted nothing else. Then, when he was four, Jinrei sent me one of your old training gloves. You’d left it behind at his house on a visit decades ago. So I gave it to Jin. And he was...fascinated. So he slept with that instead, from the day he got it. The only thing he ever had of yours. I wish I had—I had more to give him. He loved that glove so much. Daddy wanted you to have this, I told him. A little lie. But also true, I think.”

"Jun," he whispers. "Stop—" 

“He loved that glove so much. He’d try to wear it, and it was so big. This big red floppy leather thing on his tiny little hand. He didn’t need it; Kazama style is open-handed. But he wanted to be a karate-ka. I didn’t know if you would have wanted that for him. I thought it might be more…complicated.”

“Jun…”

“It got smaller as he got bigger.” She looks at the boy, sadness in her eyes. “At first, it was almost the size of his chest. And I’d look at it, and I’d think of what your hands would look like on him.”

“Dammit, Jun.” He does not want to think of this, because he sees it too, doesn’t he. He sees it all too clearly in his mind, picking up the boy, kissing her with him clambering on his shoulders. Almost instantly, his mental image changes: him taking his father's position on a cliff, with Jin—He almost throws up. No, he does not want to see this.

“As he got older, he kept it. When he got too old to want to sleep with it, it was on display in his room with his toys and his videogames. He likes videogames, did you know that?”

He did not. And he could not answer.

"Hm. And he was a good student in school, but so impatient. Top of the class, but a daydreamer. He rushed through all his assignments, doodled pictures in all his notebooks. Loved PE best. Hated English."

"I never liked it either. A stupid language." He’d never been to school. He’d only had private tutors. But to say he detested the subject in his tutelage… would not be inaccurate. He'd only learned it fluently at G-Corporation, and only because he'd had to. He still hated speaking it.

She smirks. “I know. He is so much like you, Kazuya.”

"Yeah, he’s a broody little bast—"

"No. He cares very deeply. About everything he loves. And he is so, so scared to lose what he loves, that he pushes people away so that they can't hurt him. And," she laughs. "He hates mushrooms. Which I know comes from you, because—"

"You've never met a vegetable you didn't love," he says. "I know, Jun. Please, stop."

He stares at the boy. At…his son.

Jin doesn’t look back at him. He is looking down at the ground, his eyes steely and determined. He recognizes the boy, because he had been him, once. Jin is preparing for battle. For murder. Kazuya had done the same. And Kazuya had been so convinced he was toppling a great evil in his father, and he maintained that he had.

But Jin… Well. The boy no doubt will see it the same. The demon father.  The avenging son.

He folds his arms. "My point," she says, softly. "Is that he didn't start out hating you, that there was a time he loved you. That you loved him. And that I have always loved both of you."

"Jun, to him…I was only a wound that festered," he says. "An absence that became a void."

"Absences can be fixed." She places her ungloved hand on his arm. It means nothing. It means everything. "Talk to him, Kazuya. Please. I know...I know your heart. You dread the sunrise tonight as surely as you did then."

"...We can't fix this, Jun. Some absences prove fatal when they are remedied." He isn’t sure which of them they are talking about; the boy, his shadow self, himself. 

"Maybe, if you were still...." He cuts off that foolish notion before it fully escapes his mouth. No, he will not indulge in what-ifs; what if he had won, all those years ago, what if she stayed with him or with the boy.

It does not matter that so many paths led to them being together when this one—the only one he knows—did not.

He feels his demonic eye flicker back to life, her suppression wearing off. Jin does look up then; so, he feels it. Kazuya lets the power come, and lets his wings flare out behind him, and if it blocks Jun from Jin's vision—well. 

"I don't know how to do it, Jun," he says, finally. "I was never a father to him. We have no common history."

"Talk to our boy," she says, gently brushing at his wing. The only person to have ever touched them. And she is still no less reverent than she was twenty years ago. His eyes flicker to hers.

"And you do have common history. He is your son. My son. Invite him here," she says, as if it is so easy. "Tonight. Talk to him. Just...talk."

"And how, exactly, would that help me?" He frowns. "I already hesitate too much with the boy. I don't need to know him as my son, Jun. It will only make it harder when I have to..." His hand tightens, lighting spilling out.

She ignores it.

"It is not about making your fight harder. It's about eliminating the need to fight at all." She closes her eyes. "What would you have done if your father had invited you to peace?"

"Laughed in his face." His eyes move over to hers. "You should know. I killed him."

"I know, Kazuya. I was there. I held you as you stared into that fire, watching his bones char." He closes his eyes and shudders. He wishes…That he had known. If she was going to cling so close, she could at least let him know about it.

"I tried, trust me." She closes her hand over his. "But before that—if he'd offered you a position in the Zaibatsu. If he'd offered a damn apology. If he'd reached out with one hand and saw you as anything but a demon and a curse."

Kazuya flexes his wings out of habit as she takes a step closer. Her gloved hand touches his wing, gently tugs it back so she can rest her head on his shoulder like it belongs there. "I am a demon," he mutters. "Perhaps he was right to—"

"You are a Hachijo and a Mishima. A demon and a man. A beautiful combination," she says, smiling. "And our son is, too."

"He's not a great devil. He has terrible control." He means it as a warning, but she doesn't take it as one.

"He hasn't had time to work on it like you did, Kazuya. And he's very young. Younger than you were when this all started, and he's had no teacher." 

He could have, he thinks. If the boy had just relinquished some of what was his, he would have taught him everything he knew. If he had not done that, but at least promised to stay by his father’s side...He would have trained him.

So many paths where they were together.

And never were they ever walked.

"My question remains. If Heihachi had not remained so inflexible, would you not have longed for one word of kindness from the man?"

"...I don't know." Probably not; his wound against Heihachi had festered too long. It had begun with the absence of his grandfather, then his mother. Then the permanent scar that crossed his chest. Then the—well, after that, his death. Their separation. The boy.

But he does remember being a young man, and he does remember the longing for a love he had never received.

The wings flex again, slowly retracting into his back.

"Kazuya, I am here. I can help. Please...Let me see you both together. In the same room. Even if...only once." He gazes at her, and she does not turn away.

So strong, Jun Kazama. He’d laugh if anyone else asked it of him. For her, though…

"Are you prepared to make peace with that fact?" He asks. "It will likely be only once. And it could be a waste of time. There is no guarantee the boy won't throw fists the second he's within ten feet of me." He cocks his head and nods toward her. "You may only see him for seconds. Prepare for that."

"I have peace," she says. "Regardless."

He stares at her, and she smiles. He swears under his breath and jams his hand on the buzzer near the window of his room.

"What?" William’s voice comes out, staccato-sharp.

"She hasn't changed," Jun says, leaning on him.

"Invite Kazama to my room."

There is a long pause. A very long pause. "...Kazama."

"Yes. I assume you remember your former employer?"

There is another long pause. "Alright. What time?"

"Now."

"....You are scheduled to fight him tomorrow..."

"I know that, Nina." He sighs. "Just relay the message. He's to come for dinner."

A third long pause. "...Alright."

He pulls his finger away, and wonders what the hell he is going to serve the kid.

"He likes nabemono," Jun says, smiling. "No mushrooms."

He sighs and presses the button again.

"....Yes?" Nina again.

"While you're inviting Kazama, call Ganryu. Tell him to bring some chankonabe to my room. Enough for three. No mushrooms."

"...Three." A quiet pause. "Alright."

Click.

"There," he says. "It's done."

He is now, very purposefully, not thinking about what the hell he’ll say to his son. Because the truth is, he does not know.

Bewildered, he looks down, and then realizes he should change his pants, at least. He glances over to her; she shows no signs of …distress from their….ah, hell. Lovemaking. He’ll admit it was that much.

He moves to his closet in the room, looking for a new pair of pants. Easily found. He debates asking her to turn around but opts not to. It’s nothing she hasn’t seen.

And she is still watching.

"Still to your taste...?" He asks as he buckles his belt on the new pair; a pair of arms wrapping around his back is the answer.

"Very much so," she whispers. He does not need to see her cheeks to know they are red. He lets her hold him for a moment, then looks away.

"I don't know what to say to him, Jun." It will just be easier to kill the boy, he is beginning to think. He has never had a single thought about being a father. He has never had a good role model for it.

He would never have been good at it.

"Think what you would have wanted, when you were his age. You are not so very different." She closes her eyes. "On the eve of your first tournament, what would you have wanted to hear from your father?"

"Nothing he'd ever give me."

She makes a little irritated noise. "I asked what you wanted. Not what you would have gotten. You are your own man."

"Mm." He closes his eyes, opens them; takes out a pen and pad of paper. What had he wanted from Heihachi?

An uncontestable will. An apology. An explanation.

Did any of those even apply to Jin?

He can legitimize the boy; that one is easy enough. An apology, less so. An explanation...impossible. He barely understood the curse of the Hachijo clan himself. Heihachi had died with many secrets. The clan history of the Mishima? The boy seems disinclined.

He will work with what he has. He starts to jot down an order. She watches him writing; she likes it, he can tell, by the softness of her eyes, watching him.

"You're cute when you're studious."

"You can take his demon from him, can't you?" He asks after a moment. "Or is it just me who is so lucky?"

"I can suppress you both." She says this quietly; she doesn’t particularly like that he asked. She leans over his paper. Reads it.

"You're really..." She sounds stunned; he is surprised that she is surprised by this. He raises an eyebrow.

"It should have happened twenty years ago."

"Oh." She brushes her long hair behind her ear; a shy habit, one he'd seen her do years ago and still pings his heart ruinously now. "I never assumed—"

"You should have." He chuckles. “I was going to ask you to marry me, after—”

“Oh.” She laughs, but it is sad. "I would have been surprised."

“Would you have said yes?” He asks, serious, though does it even matter?

She nods. Well. Another what-if to add to the many in his mind.

It hurts to know.

"Mmm. Jin won't want the name now." He waits a second, clears his throat. "If he wins, he might in a few years. It's a useful name. There's...connections."

And it is, really, the only thing he can gift the boy. Jin has no need of G Corp. He has no need of Kazuya's money. He certainly didn't want any wisdom. Kazuya isn’t even sure he has any to give.

"So fatalistic." She frowns at him. "You are preparing to die."

"Demons rarely get old." He had felt it coming, last time; it had trailed his thoughts, inescapable.

It is no less inescapable this time.

The demon sparks at his eye. I will choose the strongest host for my glorious unification.

No loyalty among demons, he supposes.

"I have mourned you a long time. But if you die tomorrow..." He hears her pull her second glove off; both hands are bare as she lays them across her stomach.  "This time, I will follow. We will go to the next world, arm and arm. We will cross the last river together. You'll never be alone again."

His throat feels stuck, uncomfortable. He does not deserve her. He never has. That she would follow him that far... He closes his eyes.

"Will you stay?" He asks. His voice is wobbling, and he hates it, hates the weakness it signifies in him. "...Until the end?"

"Until the very end and beyond it. We are always. Our moment is forever. Nothing and everything, all at once." A familiar spark of ki at the edge of his vision. "You and I? Endless." 

He swallows again and looks away. He is now more certain than ever that tomorrow will break both their hearts. A terrible situation to be in: if he wins, he will be the strongest of the Mishima family. But there will be no one left to battle, and no challenge left to meet, just an endless search for her that could well prove fruitless.

If Jin wins, he will die. His life will be over, his claim on the world will be over. He will never meet her again, living.  But...he will be with her in death, and he's died twice, so what does it matter to die again?

He laughs bitterly, but he wants to cry. She doesn’t offer commentary.  He jots down a couple other notes of things to go into his last effects—a few codes that would kill certain defenses at G Corp. A few other tricks and trap doors that were hidden in the Mishima estate that could still be active. Not much else.

He closes his eyes. He jots off his signature on his order legitimizing the boy.  He hands it to her.

"It's all I can do," he says.

She doesn’t get a chance to look at it. There is a knock on the door. He stands, brushes his clothing down. Double-checks his belt. Turns to look at her, one last time. Gives her a half smile.

And then he opens the door.

And on the other side is Jin Kazama.

Chapter Text

"Why am I here?" The boy asks, and Kazuya wants to roll his eyes, because there he is alright, his attitude shining through in this strange child’s genetics. How odd, he thinks, to see himself in the boy. "Couldn't wait until tomorrow, Kazuya?" There is so much hurt in that boy's eyes. Did Heihachi see this in him, once? That hatred? Jun's hand is on his back, and it is good she is here, because he swallows the insult he wanted to give the boy. 

"Koi," he says, and tilts his neck to indicate the boy should come in.

"You could be nicer," Jun murmurs behind him. A mild rebuke already; they’ve been trying to do this damn family dinner for only six seconds. This is going so well.

He knew it would be like this.

Still, he doesn’t get a chance to try to be …more hospitable, because Jin has heard his mother’s little voice; there’s no mistaking the boy’s sudden snap in interest. "What?" The boy's eyes blink then start to search the room, looking for her. "Was…that...?" So easy now, when they are so close to one another, for Kazuya to tell that the boy has her eyes, but weirdly framed with his eyebrows. Seeing them together is making it so much easier to notice what the boy has of them both, he thinks. Regrettable. "Was…that...?" He asks again, his voice a little tremulous.

There’s not much doubt in his reaction; Jin knows his mother’s voice. Kazuya tenses; Jun does not believe the boy would hurt her. He is not so certain. Jin's control over his demon is weaker, and Kazuya himself has had periods in his childhood where the demon become dominant, and he awoke covered in blood that he didn't know the origin of hours after he was last conscious of the time.

Another reason Heihachi had preferred not to send him to school, he supposed; it made it easier for the man to hide both his obvious neglect and his son's perhaps less-obvious madness.

Jun steps forward from behind him, and Kazuya shifts his stance slightly, ready to charge forward. No, he doesn’t trust the boy around her. If the boy guns for her, he’ll pull her back.

"...Mom?" Jin whispers. He is frozen to his spot, Jin Kazama, in this doorway. His next thought is that the boy looks very young, even for his age. Jun  takes another step toward him, and gently places a hand on his brow. Jin's eyes widen, his Adam’s apple bobs. Disbelief. He is quaking, he is awed. Kazuya knows the look; it was at most an hour ago when he was wearing it. 

"Jin." She smiles, that Miracle-Kazama smile no less beatific with the son than the father. He does not loosen his defenses, though, and keeps his focus on his son.

And as if to confirm his wariness, Jin takes a step back. And then he sees the boy's eyes harden. Now, they look closer to his own. "What is this?" Jin spits; he shoves past his mother, staring at him. He is still shaking. "What did you do, Kazuya?!"

"Jin..." Jun says, tapping the boy on the shoulder. As usual, she is fearless. So damn strong, but the boy is—the boy is angry. He takes a step forward. When the boy's hand goes out, Kazuya catches it easily in his palm. This part of their relationship is normal, easy. They glare at one another.

"…You got so tall, Jin," she whispers; Jun stares at them both, her eyes wet, and he realizes it is the first time she's seen them together, actually touching one another. "I didn't think..." She giggles. "I never thought you'd get a little taller than your father."

He flickers his eyes over to her; amusement is the only emotion she broadcasts. It's not a crack at him, though a part of his pride is impugned.

"I'll give you this. It sounds like her. A fantastic reproduction." Jin says, glaring. He is still pushing his fist forward, trying to break Kazuya’s hold. Kazuya isn’t letting him and just holds the boy’s fist at bay. "But my mother—you know as well as I do, my mother is dead!" He turns his glare towards Kazuya, and there is no love lost in those eyes, most certainly. "What did you do, Kazuya?!"

"I did nothing." The truth. He drops the boy's fist. Jin rushes towards him, this time with a kick. He steps out of the way. Jin moves backward toward his mother; no. He’s not allowed to do that. Kazuya moves two big steps forward, presses his body in the space between the boy’s body and hers. She hasn't been in the ring in twenty years, but he has. 

"It's not her," the boy says. "She wouldn't—she wouldn't be with you!" Kazuya frowns; Jin's voice is changing, turning slightly gravelly on that last statement. Kazuya raises his fists. He knows the signs well enough. The boy is turning.

The boy's markings slowly pour across his features; Kazuya feels the surge of power in himself, too, and answers the call, letting the hatred surge out. He would —he will protect her with it. He let his wings unfold entirely, exploding outwards. He wraps one over Jun's face.

"Kazuya—" She says, but she is slower than him in this form.

"Back," he says, cautious. He moves into a fighting position. He warned her. He knew it would come to this.

"I'll make you tell me the truth," Jin rasps, pointing at him. "And I will destroy this abomination!"

"Jin, please. Stop." The boy will not stop, he knows that well enough; he has been the boy, and he never stopped. And yet still Jun ducks out from his care, and he hates how his stomach turns when she puts herself in danger, this stupid fearless woman. 

"Jun," he says, and reaches for her, knowing it will hurt him—but she ducks his touch, and then she is next to Jin. 

"Please, Jin." She presses her palms into his skin, touching his cheeks so reverently. The marks recede from the boy’s face, the boy's eyes slam shut. She kisses his forehead, as if the boy isn’t as much a monster as his father. Jin doesn't stop her, going instantly slack and sad. Strange, Kazuya thinks, and his stomach twists. "Please."

"...You're..." Jin's chin wobbles. "Is it really...?" 

He sighs. He is beginning to wonder if the boy is going to cry. It's something he's never understood about either Kazama, their ease in tears.  "Mom...? Is it really…mom?!"

"Yes." He watches her smile as she leans up on her tip-toes, pulls her—their—son into a hug. "Oh, Jin. I've missed you for so long."

Jin, much to his amazement, does what Kazuya could not: he closes his eyes, buries himself in his mother's little neck, and sobs. It's lengthy, protracted; he would never be able to show emotion that long. He isn't even able to look at it that long. He looks away, content the boy isn't going to hurt her like this. Forces himself to stand still. His skin still itches at the thought, but at least that's not a restlessness either of them can see.

"Mom..." Jin grips her tighter. "Oh, god, mom...How?"

Jun says nothing. Jin's eyes flicker back to him, and he shakes his head; he has no answers beyond what she has said. He has no idea where she really is. He didn't think she was alive yesterday, and he's not entirely sure she is today.

Jin's eyes stay on him; the look is full of hatred, of frustration. He pulls away from his mother’s neck at long last and opts to look at her instead. "If it's truly you...How did you survive? I looked for you...."

"The Toshin? I don't know," she answers, quietly. He can pick up how ill at ease she is talking about it. He supposes even for Jun Kazama, a god is a tough fight.

"You don't know?!"

"She can't tell me," he rasps, looking at their child. "I tried."

"I can see why she wouldn't tell you." Jin spits, then instantly focuses back on his mother. "Tell me. Tell me where you are. After I finish him—"

"I can't," she says softly. "I wish I could. I wish—" She continues to talk, but the words aren’t audible. Her voice is breaking up. She is more distressed with them together. Kazuya knew this was a bad idea, and, as usual, he's been vindicated as correct.

"Please don't fight," Jun says, and she sounds meek, small. "Please. I —I just want to be with you. Both of you." She sounds so meager, so weak, and Kazuya Mishima has never detested his son until this very moment. To make such a proud, strong woman sound small. "I love you both so much—"

“Jun…" He says, but he doesn't get out much more than that. He reaches out a hand, grabs her projection—but this time, it slides through. Her image flickers.

The despair that fills him is otherworldly. 

"Why are you with him? Why him and not me?" Jin demands, seemingly oblivious of the distress this is putting on her. So, the little shit is just as jealous as he is, too. Wonderful. Now, this can get outright oedipal. At least the second stanza of the accursed Mishima song will have a different beat to it than the first.

"Jin," she whispers. "Please." She holds out her arms, and flickers again.

No, this is—he has to take control now, lest Jun sever the connection out of her own weakness. Kazuya has let her lead. He won't lose her to her own damn foolishness. Not again.

"She can't keep her projection up when she's upset," he warns, and moves in front of her to block her physically from the boy again. "And believe it or not, child, sometimes mommy and daddy do want to have a conversation without the children present." He glares at the boy. It is only her presence that is keeping him from smacking him.

"All your mother wants is a family dinner. That is...her wish." He folds his arms but doesn’t drop the demonic gaze. "I suggest you submit to it." Unspoken: I have. 

Are you a slave to her quim, Kazuya? A familiar voice asks; the demon,  or, perhaps, the memory of him. It doesn’t matter. The answer is no less complicated than it always was: No. Yes. Maybe.

"Kazuya..." She once again steps out of his shadow; she has a talent for that, doesn't she? Foolishness. He glares at her; she sighs at him, and then she turns to the boy. Gives him one of those miracle-Kazama smiles.

"Your father is trying his best. It's new to him. It's alright, Kazuya. Really." She then turns her smile full-bore at him and holds out her hands. He stares down at them and shakes his head.

"He's not my father," Jin mutters. They both ignore it. He would also prefer not to be Jin’s father in truth; it would be easier to go through what he has to do tomorrow without regrets. Or rather, it would be easier if the boy was not theirs. Those stupid eyes of hers are far more a problem than his own features in the boy.  

"The boy threatened to kill you a minute ago. I'm not giving up an advantage I have on him." Easier to say this, easier to not think of that.

Jin mutters something else that he is sure is very uncharitable, but doesn't pay attention to, because his vision is on her. She has her face scrunched up in frustration; then, she takes a deep breath and looks at him.

"Kazuya Mishima, as I have told you, it is not a crime to be afraid. But I can handle devils, as well you know. So stop pretending you're trying to hold onto this as anything but a way to deflect from your own discomfort." 

There is a noise from the boy he does not particularly want to think about that sounds like a snicker. So it seems the younger Kazama is happy to let his mother fight his battles. She keeps her hands held out. "Come on, Kazuya. He let me. You have to, too. There's no honest conversation to be had if you can just fly away the second you're uncomfortable."

"I don't trust —"

"You cannot control everything, Kazuya. Least of all your family. You have to take a leap of faith from time to time." This, he thinks, is a terrible metaphor to use with a man whose first and longest-lasting nightmare has been falling down a cliff, hands desperately bleeding as he scrambles vainly for purchase. She winces; she's read that thought. "Please, Kazuya. You trust me, no?" She smiles. 

"I —" 

"Please. Don't go crawling back into your shell on me now. We've been through too much for that. "

She holds out a hand, and he shakes his head. No, if he has to put himself through the pain of this , he's doing it properly. He bends down, and glares into her eyes. "That's not how we do this, you and me," he whispers.

"Oh, Kazuya." She chuckles, and then he kisses her before his brain can quite catch up with how stupid an idea this is. She gasps soft against his mouth and he doesn't particularly care the boy is there to watch him deepen it. His hands wrap around her waist, and he lets the kiss continue until the tail, horns and wings are fully gone.

It's a long kiss, and he savors it. "You, I trust," he whispers into her ear. "But not him."

"A start. Thank you." He feels the power recede from him, into her. Jin is looking at them both like he wants to throw up. He thinks about how he'd feel if Heihachi had kissed his mother in front of him after twenty years absence, and decides the boy might have a point.

But. He can't say he doesn't prefer his method over Jin's.

"Mother...Are you allied with him?" Jin's voice is on edge and Jun puts her hand on her head.

"Jin...Kazuya, please. I'm not allied with anyone. It's not a competition."

"It's a fighting tournament. It's always a competition. Two of us enter the ring tomorrow, and one of us leaves." Almost the same words, coming out of a different mouth. Bizarre. He tilts his head and watches the boy. 

"Well, not tonight. Tonight is so I can be with you both."

Jin looks at him and gives off the largest disappointed noise he's ever heard. As if his company is so awful.

"Quit brooding. She just...wants us together. For one night. It is not so hard a request to grant."  He glares at his son. The boy glares back. They both wait; a long beat. He is thinking—and he is pretty sure Jin is thinking—this is very strange.

And then an odd noise breaks the silence; Jun, giggling. He turns to her. She's holding her stomach, chuckling like a mad woman. "I'm sorry, Kazuya-san," she says. "But you telling anyone to stop brooding..."

She puts her hands on his, to soften the blow, though it does not. "It's endearing," she says.

He raises an eyebrow.

"...Why am I here, mother?" Jin mutters. "Why is it so important to you?"

"Because I love you both. And I know, for both of you, that is hard to understand. Because we didn't..." wavering; she blinks into connection, and blinks out. Back in. Trying to stay, he thinks. He hopes. He does not want to be left here with this boy without her. "We didn't get that time together as a family. We lost...too many years."

"Whose fault was that?" Jin says, glaring straight at him.

He opens his mouth to tell the boy to piss off, that in no uncertain terms, he had been dead and it had taken him twenty years to climb back to this point —but it is Jun, surprisingly, who stops it.

"Jin," she hisses. "Please. I don't care whose fault it was. It doesn't matter." She falters again. Her image fades, then returns a split-second later. "I know you never got the chance to know your father,  and your father has never gotten a chance to know you. But I would like to fix that today. At least a little bit.

Jin looks at him, and he looks back, and they both fold their arms, looking at one another. This was a terrible idea, he thinks. They are both too similar, and, simultaneously, far too different. To Jin, he is a terrible man, a terrible father. For him, what can he offer this adult, whose entire childhood he has missed? He has nothing to give this angry boy but his death, potentially. He does not particularly want to give the boy that.

He has given away enough of his life.

"You're stressing out your mother," he points out. Jin is visibly frustrated and raises a fist at him. He nods toward him; if that is how this is to be, then so be it.

 But then Jin does what he could not, and he turns away from the fight. He turns toward his mother and gives her a tight little smile that suggests Jin is, in fact, only grinning and bearing this as much as Kazuya is.

"Alright," he says. "For you, mother."

"Wonderful!" She purposefully ignores their distress, claps her hands and grabs Jin's hand in one arm, and Kazuya's in the other. "I am so happy."

He smiles at her; so does Jin. She brings their hands together, pulling both toward her center. "I love you both so much," she murmurs.

Neither of them return it; she winks out of existence for a moment, and his arm, deprived of her touch, accidentally brushes the boy. Neither of them draws back for a moment, both frozen. But the moment passes, as it always has between them without...her.

"Her connection to us is getting worse," he mutters after a moment; she's back by the time he gets the sentence out, and Jin only nods, distracted by her presence.

"I'm sorry," she says, soft. "I—am trying my best."

"It's alright," Jin says, though Kazuya knows it is not.

"Let's sit down." He is eager to direct something. He is the patriarch of the Mishima family now, he supposes. He leads them into his suite, toward a table. It's in the Japanese style; unfortunate, for it’s a lot more intimate for them to be on their knees. He hadn't asked for it. But they'd looked at his name, and they'd made... assumptions, he expects.

He grabs her arm and to his surprise, Jin grabs the other. He leans over, looks at the boy, who nods back. They can agree on her; she is their sole shared priority. They should protect her.

"You two are so tall," she murmurs. She has not gotten over it. "My boys."

"I'm certainly not a boy," he says; she laughs. He isn’t that much taller than her either; she’s up to his chin. But he’s not going to contest that, especially with the little shit being a bit taller; that’s opening himself up for an insult he doesn’t want to hear.

"You always will be to me. You were only a couple years older than me when we met, you know."

"...I know." 

With infinite care, he and Jin maneuver her into a position at the head of the table; a position that should be his by tradition but he will secede to her given her....condition. For want of something to do, and certainly not because he needs to do something yet does not know what to do, he gets up and walks to his sink, slowly pouring out a little cup of water. After a beat, he grabs a second one. Walks back.

Wordlessly, he offers both drinks out, one toward the mother and one toward the son. The son takes his.

"....Thanks, I guess," Jin says. He isn't looking at him. Kazuya nods toward him, the politeness all they can muster.

"I can't," Jun whispers, and gives him a little smile, and his stomach falls again. He's read the stories, all those stupid folklore books he devoured as a child to try to find someone like him, another story of  a demon-boy. He never did, but he read about all kinds of ghosts, and he knows damn well ghosts can't drink nor eat.

"Try," he says, soft. He really doesn't want to go through this without her. He doesn't know how to do this. This was her stupid idea, and her stupid child—

"Maybe later, okay?" She says and catches his frown. "Stop thinking I'm dead, Kazuya. Have faith."

He looks away. He doesn’t have a response to that. If he believed in anyone, it would be her. But even she has her limits, and it’s been many years since he relied on the fact she’d always be there. He doesn’t want to cause her further distress arguing about it. He glances at his watch. It's been half an hour of this already. And Ganryu still isn't here.

He is going to murder that sumo. He's as miserable a cook as he was a damn bodyguard. He swears under his breath and watches Jin's lip tweak upwards, amused.

He stares down at the empty table. He doesn't know what to say, but it's his role to say something. Jun oh-so-gently places her hand in his; he raises his eyes to her. She smiles at him, wordlessly telling him he has this.

And he has nothing.

"Jin," he says. "I..." He is frozen. What would his father say? Nothing. He'd just beat the shit out of the boy and tell him it was his fault for his father not being able to say a damn word to him. "Your last match was...impressive." He crosses his arm and taps out a familiar, half-panicked beat. "Phoenix is a professional and you handled him well." There. A compliment. Even a true one.

"Yeah, but he's old." Jin takes a long sip of water, nearly draining the cup. "Past his prime."

And then he stares at Kazuya. 

"Tsssch." Kazuya looks away, frustrated. It's a message, though it's not even true. He certainly isn't young, but no one would say Kazuya Mishima isn't a threat.

"Jin," Jun whispers. "Your father is trying very hard. Please don't shut him down."

"He set the match."

"I knew you could handle it," he says. That is true, though his motivation was more sparing himself the pain of listening to the stupid American barking at him as he knocked him out. It has been five competitions where he and Phoenix have met in the semi-finals and he's yet to lose. That competition has lost its luster.

And there was, deep down, on a level he won’t admit out loud, perhaps, the thought that if Phoenix could just hit the kid once he might do enough damage to knock his son out of the competition so he wouldn't have to. His fist squeezes on his arm. His son, huh....

"Yeah, well. I did handle it." Jin is quiet, and he is quiet, and Jun, even, is quiet. He sees her face look between them, and catches despairing hope, and he feels bad that they are disappointing her, even in this, even if he knew it would go this way.

Jin leans back with the impetuousness of the young and looks at him like he...looked at Heihachi. Not so fun being on this end of that glare. "Why did you agree to this?" He asks.

"Because your mother asked it of me." Jin gives him a half-smirk, like ah I knew it, and he's so annoyed, because doesn't it mean anything to the child? That Kazuya would bend this far for the child's mother? He looks at Jun, who looks at him as if she expects him to go on. Put yourself in his shoes, Kazuya.

"And because..." He closes his eyes and tries to imagine himself at the dinner table with Heihachi, all those years ago. He is an older man now, but he remembers well enough the feeling of being the odd man out at the dinner table, stewing in rage as his brother and his father talk naturally with one another. Perhaps the boy...is not so different. He doesn't bother to open his eyes; he cannot look at the boy to say this. "...I have been in your shoes."

"What?"

"I have been...there. Being that I am the only person at this table who has actually committed patricide —"

Jin sucks in a breath of air; that's caught his attention. "He's dead then?" Jin asks.

He opens his eyes and looks at the boy, though it is painful to do so. He nods.  

"Good," Jin spits. No love lost there either. He supposes that he's done the boy a favor, taking out a half of his hit list for him. Well, let it not be said Kazuya Mishima didn't do anything for his whelp.

He clears his throat. "Well. There were things...I wish I had known. Things my father had not put in order. I cannot go back in time and raise you. But I can do the old man better in preparing." He forces himself to look at the boy. 

Jin looks away. Mishima to the fucking core, this child. This will not work. But for Jun, he will keep trying, though to keep talking feels a bit like trying to pull blood from a stone.

"Your mother and I..." He clears his throat. "Well. There was a great deal around your birth I would have preferred to have done differently. I am old enough to prepare better this time."

Jin isn't saying anything. He wishes the brat would say something. He hates having to talk on end like this.

There's a knock on the door; they all three look up.

"That damn sumo," he mutters. Jun giggles; she hasn't flickered in a while, and he hopes that's a good sign. Hopes like hell. He leans back toward the door. "Enter," he yells.

Ganryu—with what could only be called extreme hesitance —stumbles into the room, wielding the world's shakiest little tray. He is in an absolute state of terror, full of cold sweat that reeks. He can smell it with his human senses, let alone his demonically enhanced ones. 

Jun smiles, her eyes familiar. "Oh, he's not changed either. Poor man." There was affection in her voice; as usual, Kazama could find her way to think well of anyone, no matter how abominably stupid.

"His current job suits his talents better," he mutters, and she smiles.

"He does seem much happier," she says, though Kazuya can only read the man's absolute unholy terror.

"Oh, good evening, good evening, sir, and uh, sir..." He gives a boggled look at Jin, then back to Kazuya. No recognition of Jun; Kazuya raises his eyebrows. Well. Interesting. Not psychically intuited in the least.

He is not surprised.

Ganryu visibly stares at them both, and he knows the image is comical: Kazuya Mishima breaking bread with Jin Kazama. And so he does as he always has, and gives the glare back, returned with a million dancing particles of frustration. 

But he feels an odd feeling creeping up his neck, and he breaks his death-glare at Ganryu to see what is causing that sensation.

It is Jin, giving the same sour expression.

By the devil himself, it is genetic. He smiles. When his eyes flicker to Jun—who has been quiet enough he wants to make sure she is still there—she has the same smile on her face.

"Please don't kill me," Ganryu whimpers, bending down into an abrupt bow that was so craven he'd have thought it was Chaolan in a Ganryu suit for a moment. "Either of you. Uh."

"Hurry up, you fool,” he mutters. The anger, at least, is easy to express. "We're having a family dinner. Is that so unusual for you to cater?"

"A-among Mishimas?" Ganryu gulps. The idea looks, frankly, terrifying to him. Perhaps he cannot blame the man.

"We're Kazamas," the boy mumbles. "More than half of us, anyway."

Ganryu abruptly pivots back into his groveling position, his hands holding up only chopsticks, and both Jin and Kazuya sigh.

He reaches out and plucks the two chopsticks from Ganryu’s shaking fists, then frowns.

"I asked for dinner for three."

"There's no third—"

"It doesn't matter what you see," he growls. "I said table setting for three."

"Forgive me!" Ganryu is down on the ground now, and Kazuya would give him credit for one thing: the man's knees could certainly still bend despite his age.

"Just get it," he mutters; Ganryu is scrambling off his little cart, and he supposes he should be relieved that the man manages, with a sense of complete and utter terror, to find a third set of silverware, which he deposits into Kazuya's palm.

"That's better."

All it takes is him muttering those two words, and Ganryu is back on the ground again, nearly running into Jun this time. She gasps quietly. "I'm so sorry, sirs, please don't kill me!"

"Watch where you're going!" Kazuya barks, and then he startles because he hears someone hit the table, and it isn't him for a change—nor Ganryu. He glances back and finds its Jin pounding the table. He hadn't liked Ganryu's foot getting close to his mother either.

"Just get on with it!" Jin barks. "Stop groveling! Serve the damn food!"

Jun looks between the two of them and sighs. He has a feeling that they have disappointed her again.

"You both have horrible table manners," she mutters. "I don't remember either of you being like that."

Jin looks chastened by the rebuke; he is not. He crosses his arms and shakes his head. He will protect what is his, and so far as he is concerned, after all these years—she is his. No matter how much that, at points, he hadn't wanted it to be so.

Ganryu looks no less than terrified; two bowls are quickly thrust at him, and he barely has to open his mouth before a third is hastily thrown on the table. The man clearly wants to escape; he spills a bit of the hotpot as he all but heaves it on the table, a tiny bit of the liquid falling to the side.

He glares at Ganryu. He can feel Jin glaring at Ganryu.

He is sure Jun has sympathy for him. "Boys..." She says, and sighs. "Oh, my boys."

"I hope you will—find it to your satisfaction...." the sumo is babbling now, and Kazuya thinks there is a not insignificant chance Ganryu will burst into tears before his little spiel is over. "If—if it is not—please call—"

"I assure you, I will call if I have any complaints. And I will have your head, Ganryu, if I find mushrooms in this."

Ganryu pales, and Jun looks at him with a frustrated glare all her own; the boy has inherited it from both sides, it seems. "You're dismissed," he says, waving his hand. This is the nicest he can be. He'll let the sumo go with a mere threat.

"Kazuya..." She murmurs as Ganryu hastily beats a retreat from his hotel room. "Kazuya, you've given our son terrible manners!"

"Do you think we've eaten together often? He's learned them all his own."

Jin glares at him, but it is the truth. But where would the truth get them today? He hesitates; sighs. Nowhere. He will be...nice. For her.  "...And neither the boy nor I enjoy anyone ...threatening you."

"We are protecting you," Jin says; he nods along.

"From Ganryu?" She shakes her head. "Both of you know he can do nothing to me. He never could. He couldn't even see me."

"If that stupid sumo made you disappear and you couldn't come back..." Jin mumbles, and looks away. That feint is all Mishima; the kid might as well be his twin. But Jun knows how to deal with him, and, he sees, how to deal with their son as well. Jun reaches out across the table and gently grabs their son's hand.

"Jin..." She squeezes his hand. "Regardless of whether I am in front of you or not, it changes nothing about how we feel about one another.  Know that I love you. And I am proud of the young man you've grown into. Your father is too, in his own particular way."

Jin looks at his mother, and then his head turns toward him. Kazuya tilts his head away, fusses with his silverware. He cannot look at Jin, and the best he can do is just fumble with a spoon and chopsticks. What is it about Kazama that always puts him in these most domestic yet terrifying scenarios?

When he finally looks up after what feels like a miserable minute of fiddling with the napkin and pulling out the spoon and chopsticks, Jin is looking at him, a careful look on his face. He knows what the boy is doing, because he's done it often enough in his life: he is evaluating, trying to read a father he feels he does not know. Waiting for the inevitable disappointment, the inevitable insult. And it does itch on his tongue to give it, it is what comes naturally to him—to point out Jin's self-righteousness, to point out his lack of control, how damn young the kid acts.

But...that is what Heihachi would do. And so it is what Kazuya does not. 

"...That true?" Jin finally asks; he is looking at him, and Kazuya has to look away. Jun's hand, under the table, grabs his own; a silent recognition that this is a terribly hard moment for him. He squeezes her hand.

"...You are very strong." He cannot look at the boy; the compliment is mumbled into the silverware. "A fearsome opponent. You are...respectable. As a man. As a Kazama...." He tries to look up, fails. He can't do it. He forces the words out anyway, though from his own voice he knows it comes out half-strangled. "...And as a Mishima, too." 

He wants to glance over at Jun, but he doesn't, knows the boy will read into that glance more than what he wants the child to see. Still, he thinks, it cannot be too bad a response, for the boy is silent. It's accepted, at least. Jun quietly squeezes his hand once more.

"I only raise good boys, you know." She smiles. "Even with your rude genes in there."

Despite himself, he laughs a little bit at that. And the soft, dry rattle from across the table tells him that Jin is also amused. Same sense of humor, he supposes. Maybe that's genetic, too.

Or perhaps they just both appreciate...her.

He taps his hand on the table. He looks at the hot pot. Jin does too.

"I always liked nabemono. One of mom's best dishes." Jin gives his mother a little smile and he tries hard not to notice that the child's smile is Jun's. Which is good, really; his was never very kind.

"You cook now?" He rumbles, uncomfortable with his own emotions; she slaps at his hand, as solid as she was when she was touching him earlier. A good sign.

"I always cooked. Not all of us grew up rich enough to have private chefs, Kazuya," she says, smiling. Jin's eyes filter between them; taking in the dynamic, Kazuya thinks. It has to be strange, he supposes. He has tried to imagine, at times, what his mother had seen in his father, but she had been dead too long for him to have the slightest clue of it.

"I meant well," he teases. " I was always the better cook between the two of us."

"...You microwaved ramen for me in the office once." She raises her eyebrows back, giving as good as she got. Kazama always did. "Such culinary achievements."

"I added to it," he says. "It wasn't just a bowl of ramen. I added vegetables. And an egg...It was better than that bowl of peas you dropped in my office for lunch that one time. Just. Peas."

"I picked those peas," she says quietly. “They were from home.”  

"...I liked mom’s peas," Jin mumbles. "She used to make that for me all the time. One great big bowl of them. They were fresh and sweet."

"You see, there you go, there's your bad genes in the boy. Lack of taste." He jabs a spoon toward her and smiles in his victory.

"If that is the worst he gets from me, he will do well." She smiles back at him, a bit sad, and he tilts his head, as does Jin. He doesn't think either of them can understand what she thinks would be such a curse to inherit from her.

"...Why couldn't that sumo see you, mom?" Jin asks, changing the topic.

"All the psychic skill of a goldfish," he mutters. He should open the lid to the nabemono, but he finds himself strangely reticent to; to open it is to confront whether Jun will try to eat it or not, and he is afraid she won't. And that will be all the worse a sign.

He can't handle this without her. 

"It is as your father says." She smiles sadly at him. "About Ganryu, at least."

"I don't have any psychic abilities." Jin is looking away, unfolding his own silverware; Jun has not touched hers. "I can see you. I can feel you."

Kazuya raises his eyebrows; Jun looks at him with the same expression. Neither of them is entirely sure where the boy has gotten this...thought.

"You are the son of the two most powerful supernatural people in Japan," he says, slowly, trying not to phrase this like an attack. "You had no chance not to inherit some of our abilities." You poor bastard.

"It's quite rare," Jun says softly. "We were fortunate to find one another, Kazuya. I do not think Jin has found...another." A soft smile. "Yet, at least." Maybe it will matter less to the boy. Certainly there must be many with their gifts who fall in love with those who do not have them. Jin didn't have the privilege of growing up in a house that all but ensured his mouth would be a steel trap; the Kazama ability to outright weep together is proof enough of that. He won't need a psychic partner to be able to have a full relationship.

Not like Kazuya himself clearly did, Kazuya thinks bitterly.

"But mom isn't....a demon....?" His eyes shift over to his mother, as if he has to make sure.

"You present more like me," he grumbles into his silverware. "As you know. You and I, we can..." He looks at her, tries to find a way to explain this. "...Project our thoughts, our emotions to some extent. But she is truly psychic. She can read us. See our true selves. She's very powerful, your mother."

"She is," Jin says, slowly, reverently. He does love his mother; that much is obvious. And perhaps, deep down, that is their sole point of commonality.

"I am thankful you are more like your father, in truth," Jun admits quietly; they both startle at that. She looks down. "It is...hard. To hear so much. Especially when young. And you were always so passionate, so hot-headed, Jin. He used to get in fights in elementary school about the stupidest things, you know."

"Mom!"

"...He used to get in schoolyard fights?" He cannot imagine it, the child is so damnably dour. So responsible. He frowns. "...Did he win?"

"He is our son, of course he won." She chuffs. "That's not the point."

Still, he has to admit, there is a part of him that is strangely proud, and he smiles at the boy before he quite realizes he's done it. Jun looks at him with a soft eye for a second, then looks away. "My point is, it's...better not to hear other's thoughts. Sometimes. It can save...grief."

He wonders if she is thinking that they would hate each other more if they could hear one another's thoughts. He looks down. He doesn't say anything. Neither does the boy.

"I thought you'd hate it," Jin finally said, his voice only a whisper. "This demon..."

"No." She reaches over the table again, squeezes his hand. "I love your demon. Because it is a part of you."

The boy actually looks like he might cry again, and it makes him uncomfortable. He breathes out loudly and it all but echoes in the quiet of the room. Both Kazamas look at him strangely.

"Why would you think that?" He says, harsh. "Your mother loved me. She knew I had it. Surely you could deduce..."

"I don't know anything about you two! You —" He jabbed at Jun. "Never spoke of him. And you—" he pointed toward him. "Haven't exactly been a font of information either."

"It is hard to talk to a boy who is trying to kill you every time you meet," he mutters, the words flying out of his mouth before he can stop them.

"It's hard to be the son of such a horrible—” Kazuya growls. Stupid little shit.

"Boys, please." Jun's maintaining her presence, but Kazuya realizes, abruptly, that they've been putting that in danger. "I know. I...am partially to blame for your relationship as well." He opens his mouth to tell her she certainly is not, but she holds up a hand to silence him. "I should have told you more, Jin. I didn't know how to. He died, suddenly, and neither of us were prepared for that outcome, I don’t think.” She smiles sadly, and the look on her face is rawer than he’s ever seen. Certainly, it had not been the outcome he had wanted.

“It hurt to think of him when you were younger. And it was very easy to tell myself that it would put you in danger to know much, that I should stay quiet not because it was comfortable but because it would keep you safer; your father had a lot of enemies. I didn't realize I was repeating the mistake I'd made with your father. Thinking we'd have so much more time together, that I could tell you when you were older." He can feel the remorse coming off of her, and it itches at him because she is the least culpable of the three of them for this mess.

"Don't blame yourself," he mutters at the same time the same words leave another mouth; Jin's. He feels warmth flush at his cheeks, which is ridiculous, as he certainly does not feel ashamed of an absence he could hardly help. He ignores the fact the boy has said the same and lays out his cards.

"The Mishima blood that flows through us...it would always come to this, Jun. You couldn't stop it. Even if I had won that fight, it would have come to this. It always comes to this."

"That is not true," she says sharply. She knocks her hand out in frustration and has enough power in her that she knocks the lid of the pot half-off. Both he and Jin stare at that lid. "You tell yourself that, Kazuya, because it makes a fatalistic amount of sense for you. This is why my father did not love me. Why my son does not love me. It is easier for you to face that than what you have contributed to either situation."

Too far. He stands up and walks away, briskly. The room is quiet as a tomb as he grabs a glass of water for himself at the sink, and he drinks it slowly. If it were anyone else, he would be out the door, and there would be a body on the floor he’d be asking his underlings to dispose of for him.

But for her, he will stay, miserably, at this sink, trying to remain calm.

"I am sorry," she says, softly. "But it is the truth."

"Tell me, Kazama," he spits. "What did I do to deserve being thrown off a cliff? To witness my mother’s murder, begging my father to spare her? To hear my grandfather cry out for food, for water, for death, and to be able to give him none of those things? To be starved like a dog for days at a time for not being perfect as a child? With Jin, for the past two years—you can blame me. I'll be your villain. But Heihachi..."

"You didn't start it," she says, softly. "But you worsened the bond between you every chance you got until death was the only option."

"Death was always the only option. There was no bond to break. The man detested me. Not once did I have the fortune to merely have him be an absentee father."

"That can be a hell all its own," Jun says sharply, and he knows she means their boy. The boy, he thinks, has gotten very, very quiet. He whirls around and finds Jin still sitting there, looking disgustingly pensive.

"I didn't know," he says. "You know it would have been …different if I had, Jun.” For years he had wondered how he would have reacted had he known; now he knows. The second his eyes met hers, he would have been no less besotted with her than he had been as a younger man, even if he still resented her role in his death. He’d have convinced himself keeping her close was the only way to prevent it happening again, even if it meant her and Jin would live with him in a little lab deep underground.

"Would it?" Jin finally says, his voice cool and judgmental and not one be bit less devastating for all its coldness. He snaps his glass of water between his fingers in an instinctual reaction; glass and water rain down his hand in equal measure. He narrows his eyes. Damn these Kazamas! He will let her go; if they want to push him like this, he can push back. He is still a tiger and he still very much has claws.

"...Yes." He hisses. "You stupid, spoiled child. You think me some kind of coward? I missed your childhood because I died. Because of your fucking grandfather, I lost everything. And it took twenty fucking years to claw my way back here. Do not throw a pity party because you had no father; be thankful your father was not like your grandfather. I am not a better man than him in many respects, but in this..." He gestures toward him. "I am far superior."

Jin folds his arms and just glares at him. "Hon Maru—"

"You're still breathing, aren't you?" He raises his eyebrows. "Still unscarred?" He didn't even fucking win that fight and still this exhausting child tosses it in his face.

Jin says nothing.

He whips off his vest and then his shirt, tossing both onto the bed. "This is what my father did to me. Every last fucking scar. Take a good look and be thankful the worst you can say of me is that I missed your stupid karate practices. My father went to mine, then he beat me bloody if I threw a left punch when he thought I should have thrown a right. Until I could barely walk. But evidently that was my fault —"

"Oh Kazuya, I have told you—" Kazama the elder now, glaring at him; she is frustrated. She doesn't like his grandstanding. "I am not talking about that. You never deserved that treatment. I'm saying that as an adult, you constantly stirred the pot, you never tried to find a more peaceful solution—"

"There was no peaceful solution! Do you think I wanted this?!" He is yelling now, and he slaps the kitchenette countertop hard. "His first attempt on my life, I was five years old! It never stopped past that point! What was the peaceful solution, Jun?"

"If you'd left with me..." She whispers, and he laughs. How long has she been nurturing that little fantasy? That there was some chance they could leave without him committing patricide, that they could be a happy little family in the middle of nowhere, with none of the pressures of their ancient families or social obligations? Too long. Time to disabuse her of such foolish notions.

"It would have solved nothing, you naive, foolish woman. You didn’t know him. He would never have let it go. We would have been on the run for the rest of our short, unhappy lives. Just regaining the Zaibatsu—it wouldn't have been enough for him. He would have hunted me. And when he found us—and he would find us—he would have killed us all. Jin first. Painfully. He'd have made you and me watch. Then he'd kill you, but he'd be slow enough to make you wish for it first. Maybe even beg. He’d make me watch you die, and then and only then would he deal with me. That was our fate if we’d run.”

And by that point, he knew, he himself would beg for it. A difference between him and his father —Heihachi Mishima never begged for a damn thing in his life. What did it matter if one son died? He could make another. He never cared enough about his lovers to worry about keeping them long.

But for Kazuya, there would only ever be Kazama. And without her…well, there was nothing to pursue without her but power.

Now both Kazamas are quiet, and he wishes they were not, because he doesn’t want to talk about this and he doesn’t want to think about it. But they give him no succor. Jun is quiet. Jin is quiet. He grabs a new glass and takes another drink; he isn't quite strong enough to walk back there, and he's still pissed.

"... If I could have been there, I would have." He waives an exhausted hand toward the boy, but he can’t quite bring himself to turn around and confront them both. He doesn’t want to see those stupid Kazama eyes that can hide nothing. "Believe it or not. That day…was the worst of my life. There is no absence of competition for that, Kazama, but you managed to come out on top. Impressive.”

They are still deathly quiet; he sips his water and wishes his demonic suppression would wear off, because he certainly doesn’t want to talk about this. He would far rather fly out the window and fly as fast as he could, until his lungs hurt from the exertion and he didn’t have enough strength left to talk or think.

But instead, he is here. He looks down. It was the worst day of his life, but he will admit—if only to himself—that he is relieved that it kept Heihachi's focus off of them. At least for a while. He has never been a father to the boy, no, but he managed to keep Heihachi from killing him young, if only on accident.

Not that it mattered. That’s the stupidest thing. All of this? Pointless. None of it matters. The Mishima destiny was written long ago, and not one of his damn hopes it would be different with him ever came to pass.

“All this talk is pointless. Even if I won that fight, it would not have changed a damn thing.  You could have grown up bouncing on my knee, and by some miracle, I could have become as kind as your mother, and you know what the end result would be? You would still despise me. You are my blood. And thus, it will always be this way. I wish it was different. But this is the way of house Mishima. Rebellion. Conflict. Death."

"If that's the case, then why was there peace for fifty years between your father and his father?" Jun’s question, aimed squarely for him. He sighs and turns around.

"A world war,” he says. He doesn’t want to talk about this anymore. "Occupied them for a while. But the peace ended, Jun. My grandfather tried to be a good man, and where did it get him? Locked up under the basement in Hon Maru. Murdered by my father, and again by your son."

She is silent at that and looks down; perhaps that is a bit of information she didn’t know.

"He was a ghost," Jin says, looking down at his hands. "Or...possessed. Something like that.”  

"Did you even realize that in the moment?" He asks snidely.

Jin doesn't say anything.

"Or did you just think, he is a Mishima, so he must die?" He smirks; self-righteousness courses through him as he re-buttons his shirt and vest. "Ah, you know. We are rectifiers, you and I—"

"Don't," Jin hisses. He doesn't like the reminder of what the demon whispers to him.

"No. The reason that peace ended is because Heihachi's lust for power won out against his love for his family. I do not think the same is true for Jin." A beat; he knows what’s going to come out of her mouth, but it doesn’t make it easier to hear. "It isn't true for you either."

He stares at her, eyebrows raised. He has the entire world in the palm of his hands. He could ruin this stupid rock with a click of his fingers. "Is it not? Do you not realize what I am? What I’ve done?”

"Immaterial as far as this discussion. You wanted Jin," she says, softly, gently, and no less devastatingly for all her charms. "You have said it yourself."

"Did I?" It's a weak pivot but he's uncomfortable, and he wants to throw it back at her. She gives him a leveled glare that suggests she remembers that conversation the last time they were in this situation just as well as he does. Wordlessly, she stares at him, one eyebrow raised. I gave you a choice. You chose to gamble with creating life. He did. He'd wanted it with her, even if he didn't have the words. But it's hard to admit that much.

But he’d thought – thought it would be different. And his mental process at the time certainly wasn’t…simple.

"You said you wanted to have been his father. You wanted him. Then and now." She stands. "Don't argue about that. I know your heart."

Quietly, he says. "I know." He isn't fighting that. She knows him better than he knows himself at times; an ecstasy and an agony all its own, that. He looks away again.

"And yet even reading both your minds, neither of you believe me." She sighs. "Let's put the cards on the table before we eat then. Jin—do you want to kill your father?" His stomach plunges down to his feet. He's forgotten Kazama's fiery desire to fix everything, and her ceaseless campaigning for it.

He doesn't look at the boy, and the boy doesn't answer. Not for a long moment. A fist hits the table; Jun's, he thinks, but he can't look to confirm. His eyes seem rooted on the glass in his hand, and its odd little shake, the water dancing in front of his eyes. Which makes little sense as the man himself is surely not dreading this answer.

He already knows what it is, after all.

 "Jin. Answer. Now." Jun isn't letting the kid draw it out and he doesn't know if he wants to thank her for it or tell her to leave it alone, avoid the subject entirely.

"...No." Kazuya's eyes do look at the boy then, who is looking away. Typical Mishima, this brat, my god, it must be genetic, there is no other explanation. Poor little bastard. "I'll do what I have to, mother, but it doesn't mean I enjoy it."

"Alright," his mother says, evidently satisfied enough, and then points at him. "And you? Do you want to kill your son?"

"Would he be alive to talk to you if I did?" He spits toward her. But she is used to his fire, and she merely nods.

"Yes, that's true. So. Neither of you want the other to die. Yet you are both convinced one of you will tomorrow. Why?" 

Neither of them answer. Both look away. There is no answer but that they are Mishima. Because to walk away now—is impossible. Jin can no longer walk away from his path any more than Kazuya could his. No matter how remorseful they are.

She stands and walks over to Kazuya. He presses his back up against the kitchenette, though of course there is no escape from her. She's very good at that.

She gets close to him and stares at him with wide, tender eyes. That damn miracle-Kazama smile. "Kazuya...Please... Let’s fix this." Her hands wrap around his waist and pull him into a hug. He can't quite return it.

"I can't do this." He mumbles it, quiet. "It's pointless, Jun. We can't fix this. It's too late. The boy has his allies. I have my power. Neither of us wants to let the things we've spent our lifetimes accumulating go."

She grabs the back of his head and pulls him towards her; he doesn't resist. "Try. Please. For me. Why can’t you walk away? This isn’t making you happy, Kazuya.”

He doesn't answer her, just lets her press her little forehead up against his own in a familiar headbutt that makes his heart hurt. He stares into her eyes, completely without hope, and knows she sees it, because she looks no less haunted.

"He may not hate me, but the path is laid. The final is set. It's too late. One of us will die tomorrow. That's...the end of it." He presses his forehead to hers. The rest of this sentence is for Jun, and Jun only; he whispers it in her ear. "And...for you, I will let the boy end it." 

She gasps and pulls him tighter to her, gently strokes his hair. She knows what he's telling her; the ultimate act he can do for her, for the boy. To give his short and unhappy life for their son's. To give up every last bit of his power he's spent the last forty years accruing for...her. 

He is letting himself be subsumed by her again, and the worst part is he can't find himself even being angry about it because being in her presence makes him want to do this as terrifying as it is. 

Who would have ever thought him the type to be so self-sacrificial? He laughs. Certainly not himself. Then he makes a noise that is not quite a laugh, not quite a scream, but some strange thing in-between; it’s so damn unfair. This damn family. This damn curse. He's barely gotten to live and now he has to die. It's not fair. It's not fair. It was not fair twenty years ago and it's not fair now, and this world is just a sick, desolate rock with nothing good in it but her. He doesn't even have a word to express it, just the rage and bemusement at the world being as shit as he always thought it was.

And he can't seem to stop making that noise.

And no one says anything for a very, very long moment. He isn't sure how long, but he feels her start to cry silently, because a tear hits his cheek, and it isn't his; she is losing hope. He's finally broken even miracle-Kazama, at long last, and as usual, he isn't a damn bit happy about his accomplishments.

He lays his head down further. "I'm..." He trails off. He doesn't know what to say. She just wraps her arms tighter around him and they stand there like that. He is sure it is disgusting to the child to see his parents embrace so. Jin is once more very quiet, but he can't quite bring himself to look at him, not with Jun looking at him like he's broken her heart for the last time.

Maybe he has. 

He cups her cheek and peers into her eyes. Don't leave me. Don't you dare fade out.  I need you.  He is no less a mess than he has always been, and he needs...he needs her.

She doesn't fade, just looks at him, so sad. She weeps for him, and he knows it is no less than she has for twenty years. He squeezes her back tightly, as if he can keep her anchored to him.

He is concentrating on her so intensely he doesn't hear the boy approach. The boy's hand lands on his hand and he startles, because it's not hers. "Hey," Jin says, and his voice is soft. Tender.

Like his mother's.

This boy. His son and his soon-to-be-murderer as well. He closes his eyes and says nothing, just shudders into Jun's shoulder. "Your dinner is going to get cold," Jin says. He still can't quite look at the boy. He suspects Jin approached him from the back because the boy can't quite look at him either. They are...very similar.

And Kazuya knows well enough how much hesitation he showed to his own father, when it came time to murder him. A soft laugh bubbles up in his throat; hysterical. Both times. Both times he hesitated not at all. He wanted to kill the old man. Relished it. Went home and slept sound in his bed for the first time in years. Both times.

And now, for the first time. he wonders if maybe Heihachi had let him win, too. Certainly not the first time, of course.

But maybe the second time. There had been…remorse…in the old man’s eyes.

And now Kazuya is no less haunted.

So he supposes he will walk in Heihachi's footsteps once fucking more, and take the loss again because...because despite never having a happy life at all, despite not knowing this stupid idiot of a child, he is Jun's son. Their son. And he could no more kill him than the mother. Who are we if we cannot be honest with one another? She had asked. Well, then, the horrible truth: deep down, he does not want their son to die. He doesn't want to die either, but between the two of them...he will sacrifice himself for another, and it terrifies him to realize that he would do that so easily.

For a boy he has never known.

An utter failure he is. A fool. A betrayer of every teaching he'd ever learned. His father wouldn't be so fucking sentimental. It had never mattered to his father that he was the last living remnant of Kazumi Hachijo; why does it matter so much to him that Jin Kazama is hers?

He laughs, high and maniacal into her shoulder. He is not alright. She always does this to him. Screws him up. Makes everything in his life so fucking complicated. Her grip on him gets tighter; he thinks she is worried. She should be. His sanity is questionable at the best of times.

This isn't the worst of times, but it's pretty close.

This was such a stupid fucking idea. A family dinner. It is far, far too late for this. He has to think of something else; he will not be sitting here crying like a child into his ....woman's neck for hours.  He breaks away from them both, takes a deep breath, and forces himself to change the topic.

"...It probably isn't very good anyway. That stupid sumo..." A soft laugh. A stupid pivot. He cannot look at the boy. Why can't he? Heihachi would have been able to do it. Heihachi would have marched over to the table, picked up the hot pot, poured the nabemono all over him and left him in the room, leaving the boy covered in burns and alone. He closes his eyes. He is better than that, isn't he?

But what does it even fucking matter? It doesn't. None of this fucking matters. So why even try? Why tell this boy he hesitates to hurt him today if he will have to feel the boy's boot upon his neck tomorrow? Why bother to be vulnerable when all that will happen is that it will lead to him being taken advantage of yet again? It has never gone a different way. He is old enough to have gathered enough evidence of how much his vulnerabilities have cost him.

And now, he knows: it will cost him his life. He will die for this stupid boy, tomorrow. He knew from the moment he wrote out that order, but he's confronting it now, and it tastes slick and oily and bitter to his tongue. A long life of suffering. A few weeks, perhaps, of happiness in all this wretched life.

And now...the end. Inglorious.

He needs to get off this topic. It is too much. God damn Kazamas and their propensity for fucking his life up.

"Well, since you did order it...Let's try to eat it. For mom, huh?" The boy doesn't seem to understand the tsunami of feelings inside of him; maybe he is lucky enough not to feel it himself. Kazuya supposes it makes sense. The boy can love his mother and not his father without conflict; one did not require the other to raise him. But for him, the boy will always be a mix of them both: her eyes, his eyebrows; her stupid smile, his terrible hands. He cannot see the child without seeing the mother. He cannot love the mother without, in some way...caring for the child, as well.

Even if the child is, and always will be, his largest mistake. His murderer that he fully brought into this world and found himself unable to take out of it.

He closes his eyes and Jun presses her hand to his brow, slowly rubbing small circles along his temple. He doesn't move away from it, but he doesn't answer either; he lets his emotionless mask slide back down. The boy's hand stays on his, but he doesn't turn to hold it.  It's not quite a hug. Not quite even a handshake.

But it feels...more intimate, than what they had before.  Jun smiles at them both and withdraws her hand from his temple; her hand lands on top of Jin's as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. It has a pleasing weight to it, these two Kazama hands on top of his own. He doesn't break it.

And for a moment, they all just stay there like that. Not quite a family hug. Not quite not.

He swallows and takes a deep breath, concentrates on their hands, all together for the first time. For the last. "Will you eat with us?" He murmurs to her.

She gives him a sad little smile, and his heart sinks a bit. He knows that means the answer is likely no.

"I will try, but...I've never tried to eat anything like this before." She brushes one of his loose hairs back behind his ear, and her smile is kind; teasing. "You're not allowed to laugh if I spill or it just...goes through."

"I'll help you clean it up," he whispers, quiet enough that hopefully the kid won't pick up on it. Jin breaks the hold, sliding his hand out from the bottom.

"I uh, do wish, you know. That it was different." Half mumbled, from the child. Jin is beating feet hastily back to the table, and he imagines that is why he is speaking now. Cowards, both of them, at least in this. "I don't like...I don't want to..."

"I know," he says.

His words hang in the room, limp and sad.

"I wish it was different. I wish we got a chance to..." The boy can't find any other way to end this, either.

"...If...." Jin says, then hangs his head. He knows what the boy is thinking. There is not much point in ifs. Ever since they have shared two halves of the same spirit, they have been fighting this. A war for unification between demons can only ever end one way.

He walks back to the table, every step seemingly taking an eternity.

But this will be the last meal he ever eats, so he treasures every last one of those steps: the feel of the carpet underneath his feet, Jun’s calming presence at his side. He sits down and pulls out his chopsticks, and he stares at the boy, and he takes a deep breath.

And he tries to focus on anything but the fact that his life is ending tomorrow, but he knows, in this, that he will not be that successful.

Still, he does try.

Chapter Text

“If…” Jin says again, and he looks at the boy as he sits back down at the dinner table. Jun sits at his side Jin does not seem to notice, or, if he does, Jin does not seem to care.

It’s a small mercy; Kazuya’s not doing too good himself. He can’t answer the boy with anything other than a look, and his hand goes into hers. Don’t leave. I don’t want you to leave. I don’t want to leave.

He feels a tear burn at the edge of his eyes; he stares down at his silverware, not letting it fall. He will not cry, not for his own death.

“If…” Jin starts again, as if it’s the only thing he can say, then he fades away. Jin scratches his neck and looks away. Whatever he’s trying to say, well, he’s not having a lot of success in getting it out.

Kazuya knows where Jin inherited that particular trait from.

“Jin,” Jun says; she reaches out with her free hand and grabs the boy’s as well. “What is it you’re trying to say?”

“It’s just…you keep saying it would be different if…” Jin mumbles, looking so odd as he looks down. So damn odd, to see his own body language in this child. “I just wonder. What would it have been like?" Jin finally gets out. "If we had...been together, back then. What would that have looked like?"

He doesn't answer; he stares into the food he's ordered instead. It's ...well, it's what he expected it would be. Chankonabe, sumo stew, piled high. Lots of protein, and all kinds. He knew the boy would need protein, but he hadn't known what his son liked best, so now Jin doesn't have to choose. There isn't a single mushroom in sight in it; Ganryu lives another day. It's still warm enough there's steam coming out, despite their lengthy …detour.

Jin seems to know it’s going to take him time to reply, because he doesn’t demand an answer right away; instead, the boy holds out his bowl, and Kazuya is a bit relieved, because he at least knows his role here: he's the patriarch, he has to serve the boy. He remembers these rules well enough; Heihachi giving him only what he felt he had earned, which was often nothing or close to it, an insulting few sips of broth. He'd starved often enough as a child. Probably would have starved to death if it weren't for the demon.

Jin is not a child. But Jin is his child. And so as a father, Kazuya piles his bowl full and does the same for the mother. The only meal they'll ever have together. He'll provide for his strange little family well enough for this one, miserably limited dinner. Maybe his kid will feel guilty enough about murdering him in a few years that he'll be able to haunt the little shit.

"Thanks," Jin mutters, quiet. He just nods, tersely. He's still thinking about Jin's question.

"It..." he sighs. It’s painful to think about what roads they haven’t walked down, and he’d rather not think about a different world, where everything would have been so much better. "It does not matter.”

“Kazuya…he didn’t ask if it mattered.” Jun looks at him, her eyes gentle and sweet and probing him in a million directions, trying to convince him to walk down a million roads he doesn’t want to go down. It’s unpleasant to think of it; what he could have had. What he did and does not have. Doesn’t she understand that?

You could answer, too, he thinks, but she just shakes her head lightly; Jin probably knows her version already. A shame. Kazuya does not.

“Well…” He says, slowly. “You would have been Jin Mishima, I think. I wanted to ask her to marry me after that fight.” He had been torn on it, but it had crystalized into his mind, those last desperate hours of being alive in his first life. He stares into his soup, but the smile was sad, and he can see the melancholy of it in his own reflection. “I…had a ring for you, in my locker. I wonder what happened to it. They didn’t give it to you, surely?”  

She shakes her head and lowers her eyes.

“…They should have.”

No one says anything, and he is annoyed, now, at people he’s long since stopped employing. It had been a nice ring. Platinum and white gold band, cruelty free diamond, flawless. Princess cut. He remembers it well enough.

He hopes it went to some poor asshole who hocked it; better that than fall back into Heihachi’s hands. “I think your mother would have said yes.”

“Mm-hmm, I would.” A squeeze of her little hand on his knee. “I would have been very surprised. But yes.” A soft smile. “Odd to think of myself that way, now. Jun Mishima.”

“So we’d be married. That would be…different.” So different it hurts to imagine it; how many years has he tried not to?

And still the mental image of her with him in a ceremony they never got to have comes. “And you would have come along, of course. And I would have…been there.” He swallows; this is the part that’s painful to explore. He cannot face the idea of it easily, and he has tried over the last two years. The thought of raising this child; of holding him as a baby. Of trying to teach him Mishima-ryu as a child; he cannot see himself as a good teacher.

But he is still sad to have never gotten that chance to try, even knowing he would inevitably fail. How can he say what they have lost? The boy knows it as well as he has; the only difference is that Jin has felt it as a slow realization of a thousand papercuts while Kazuya has experienced his realization in one powerful, painful punch. Best not, he thinks, to go too far down that road. Say it plain and move the fuck on.

“It…I would have been there. You would have had a father who would have tried his best to…” He fades out. To what? It was hard to vocalize that. To not be Heihachi. To not make you feel like a prize fighter as a six year old. To not breed you to exist solely as an extension of myself. He couldn’t get the words out and they fell apart somewhere in  his chest. He swallowed them and moved on. “He—I—probably would have failed you."

"Kazuya—" A sharper noise from Jun; she’s always seen the best in him, in Jin, in even Heihachi. She sees the best in everyone. It is a trait he admires, at times, and one he does not understand. He was never meant for this. Never. There is never a universe in which this child’s existence would not have filled him with both dread and desire.

"I have no good model for this and have no natural paternal inclination," he says softly. “I know I would never be the parent you would turn to in comfort. But you still would have had a mother who loved you, and a father would have tried for your sake, at least. I think…"

He glances toward her and finds her cheeks flushed.

“You would have trained in your mother’s family arts. And mine, though I would not have been a good teacher. And sooner or later, things would have turned out the same between us, if burdened by more memories." He ducks his head down; he doesn’t like to think about the what if's. Would he teach the boy about his powers, when they started presenting? Or would he snap the boy's neck one day and simply find himself holding a dead child and numerous regrets?

That is the thing with Jin Kazama: he never knows if Jin brings out his best impulses or his worst.

He doesn’t like thinking about this.

“Funny, isn’t it? How we could be so different and still be…the same?” Jin, sounding wise beyond his years; he nods. Jun looks down. Jin has all but proved his thesis.

All the roads they could have taken – it seems so obvious now that they all lead to the same final destination. A father, a son, a murder, a death.

Same story as it ever was.

“Well…The soup looks good,” Jin says, and he knows the boy is trying to make things a little lighter, to not dwell as Kazuya is dwelling. That is his mother in him. That desire to pull up on the metaphorical airplane, while Kazuya’s instinct has always pulled toward tipping the throttle down, faster and faster. If I must crash, then let’s make it a glorious burn. That’s always been his methodology.

Kazuya reaches down and finally fills his own bowl too; not as much as the others, but he needs to do something that isn’t imagining a life he never got to live and isn’t entirely sure he would have wanted to. He isn't hungry. He wasn't hungry last time he was going to die either. But he'll keep up appearances enough to try to sip a bit at it tonight.

He hears the scrape of a spoon on a bowl; Jin's. He watches the kid put the spoon up to his mouth and hesitate.

"Neither of you are eating."

"I'm not...." He fades off. Jun just looks sad.

"It's not...a trap..." Jun says weakly, looking at Jin with an expression that somehow manages to torture the father as much as it does the son. It’s clear neither of them was even thinking about that possibility, and they both reel back, a bit stricken. Kazuya raises a spoon.

"Here," he says, roughly, and takes a sip. It's...not bad. It's actually good, which somehow makes him all the sadder. He swallows, though he feels like throwing up. He grabs his spoon and leans over to Jun. "Here."

Her eyes glow a bit at that; the look on her face is pure nostalgia, and she looks at the spoon, then back at him.

"It's mostly broth," he whispers. "Should be easy."

"You've never been easy," she says, with a shaky breath. "Either of you."

But then she closes her eyes, and she drinks, and he almost shudders in the ecstasy of watching the liquid stay within her little mouth. She chews, she swallows, and it doesn't...fall through. She ate. She drank.

And all those stupid little stories say...she's alive. She's alive.

"Finally," she says softly. "You believe again."

"I always believed in you," he says, though his voice sounds half-strangled even trying to get that much out. He always did. She wouldn't be half as terrifying to him if he didn't.

Jin carefully chews his own spoonful, and he watches as the boy evaluates it in his own mind. They think alike, he thinks; Jin is pensive, his eyes piercing that bowl of soup like he can discern all its secrets. Odd to see his mother's intensity on his son's face. "It's....actually good?" He sounds surprised.

"It actually is," Jun says quietly. "It makes me happy Ganryu has found his gift."

"He was certainly due for it," Kazuya mutters, the complaint without emotion and simply his default state of behavior.

He sips his soup half-heartedly, just a few sips. Puts the spoon down. Inches a little closer to Jun. If it's his last...night alive, he's going to enjoy what's important about it.

His ...woman, and his...He can't quite bring himself to admit he wants to be a little closer to his …son, as well.

Everyone is quiet for a few moments.

"Jin..." He says, looking down; he needs to say something, he knows, but he’s never been so aware of how large the gulf between them has been than he is sitting at this table. He doesn’t want to talk about what-if’s anymore. There is no point in them. But it is hard to see much point in asking the boy anything about the future. So instead, he pivots to the past..

"Did you like growing up on Yakushima, Jin?" He is gambling there, hoping that the boy is no less fond of the incessant greenery than the mother was.

He’s hit home; Jin gives him a half-smile. "I loved it there. It's beautiful. I can't imagine growing up anywhere else. It's wild to think that I might have grown up in Tokyo if things were a bit different. I had the hardest time sleeping there when I had..."

The boy, abruptly, trails off, but Kazuya, who knows little about this boy, knows enough to fill this in: when I had to move into the Mishima estate.

"I never liked the estate either. There were always too many ghosts there," he admits, looking at the boy. "I wound up staying in the penthouse most of the time after...." He pauses again. He doesn’t know how to phrase this in a way that wouldn't be alienating. After I first tried to murder my father. If only it had been a successful attempt then. He still regrets that it was not. But he hadn't known enough and had settled for the thought of poetic justice over the more practical possibilities.

If he had a time machine, he'd go to that point; he has decided that and decided it long ago. Shoot the old man square between the eyes, disembowel him, pluck out his eyes, and then—and only then—treat him to the voyage off the cliff.

But that, also, is not a thought to voice. Jun's eyebrows raise, suggesting she has heard the thought. He did murder me and tried to murder our son too, you know, he thinks, and she sighs, seemingly coming to the same conclusion, or, perhaps, picking up on that, too. She shakes her head softly and looks down. She blinks, and she looks weary, and his stomach twists. She has been looking like that at them for a bit now.

She is getting tired, he thinks.

And though he is not psychic on her level, he knows that this means that she might leave them soon, and he cannot handle it, cannot handle her disappearing like so much dust in the wind.

He has had that happen often enough in his life.

None of them say anything for a long moment. Then he tries to change the topic, again. He does not want to think more about Heihachi. He has given enough of his life to that man. He will talk about something that will keep her interested instead, keep her here, in as much as she is able. Perhaps that is selfish of him. He thinks she will forgive him for it; he was always a selfish man.

"Even if I had been…in your life, you still would have grown up knowing Yakushima. Your mother never would have been able to leave it entirely. We'd go between the two."

Jun gives him a surprised little look, and he raises an eyebrow. You don't think I was prepared to do that for you? I would have. Easy to say now. Perhaps it would have been harder to do then, had he ever had the option to.

Jin nods, equally surprised, and he tries not to notice how they have the same uncomfortable body language, the mother and the son. Tries, but fails; he does notice and is eerily aware of it. Jin slowly stirs his soup with his spoon, then looks up. Opens his mouth, but nothing comes out – that silent hesitance, though, pure Mishima. Poor bastard. Back to the soup. Then, quietly, his own voice sounding no less strangled than his father’s when he gets emotional: "Guess I'm happy. Of that. That being Jin Mishima wouldn't have been so..."

"You would always be your mother's son," he says, softly. It is inevitable, he thinks, that Jin would prefer his mother. Even if Kazuya had held him as a child, he would never have been able to give the boy the affections that Jun could. Heihachi had ensured his son would not be built for it. "You would have known her culture. I wouldn't have—I wouldn't have stopped that."

"I guess I just assumed..." He looks down into the soup, not talking, and he knows what the boy assumed. That he would be the same as Heihachi, who had so clearly drilled out every last bit of Yakushima from the boy that he could. He'd no doubt felt he had to; it wouldn't do for the Mishima heir to have even the slightest hint of a Kagoshima accent, would it?

"You shouldn't," he said, and his voice is a bit strangled. “I would never have taken that from you."

He’s had enough of it taken from himself. He’ll never know his mother’s side, beyond the demon blood that pulses in his veins. There is no Hachijo family left outside of this room. He can barely remember his mother’s voice anymore. She had a Kyoto accent surely, but he does not remember enough to even know that, really; the only thing he remembers of it in her voice is how she used to say oyasumiyasu when he went to bed, a half-whispered little secret between them. Good night. The only word he remembered her saying in her dialect, and it was a goodbye.

His throat tightens. He does not want to think of that man, of that mother. He will be seeing them soon enough, and neither is someone he wants to see. His fist tightens; this is pointless. He would not take it from the boy, his mother’s culture. That is all that is relevant to know. The history that brought him to the point has no bearing. If the Jin Mishima of that timeline would occasionally use ja for da well, he would grow up rich enough people could put up with the eccentricity.

Jin says nothing. He says nothing. Jun gently smiles at them both.

"I wish we could have had that," she admits, softly. "But maybe you can...give him something from that life?" She looks at him; she looks...very tired now. He pushes the bowl away from him, his stomach twisting at the knowledge she is tiring fast. She wants to see him give the boy his...his heritage, he supposes. So he will do that, no matter how much he has been dreading this. He swallows. He gets up.

He feels two strange little pairs of eyes watching him; his Kazama owlets, his strange little family that he never believed he'd have and indeed mostly has not had at his side.

But they watch his every move anyway.

He picks up the paper in his hands, and it falls out of his palms, and he swears under his breath, because he's not the type to drop things, he's never been. Been beaten often enough for the crime of it as a young child, to the point that even in his middle age he still winces every time a pen falls on the ground—but the paper falls regardless, and he has to pick it up, and then he's holding it so tight the paper is almost crinkling in his hand, and it's making a weird noise, waving back and forth, but that, too, is impossible, because he's not nervous, he's not terrified, so why should his hand shake so?

"Kazuya..." She says soft, and he wants, so badly, to hand this poison page over to her and let her handle it. She was always so much stronger at these things than he was. Always so very much the better one at socializing, despite having a childhood almost as odd as his own.

"Here," he says, roughly, and shoves the page at Jin. Jin doesn't take it, the little shit, just glaring up at him. The glare is neutral though; not hateful. He is sure Jin thinks he is acting odd, which he is, because he never meant to have a child, not really, and then he never got to raise the one he had on accident or perhaps a slightly-more-planned accident if you can call his mad, unspoken wish twenty-two god damn years ago that, and now he's offering Jin something that means a lot to him but nothing to this strange child who will surely throw it in his face.

But for Jun...he will...he will try. He will try. Even if it’s pointless.

"It's for you," Kazuya says, his voice gravelly. "Take it."

Jin’s hand reaches up, but he hesitates; the hand of this young man. His son.

"Jin..." Jun says quietly. "Please."

And when Jin grabs the paper in his hands, he can see Jin’s hands are shaking also. He supposes he will be satisfied with that. He can at least elicit a reaction that isn't...entirely...rage. For Mishimas, this is the best, he supposes, they can hope for.

He is so uncomfortable. He wants to leave this room so badly.

But he doesn't.

Instead, he sits down with a heavy noise. He just keeps his eyes down as the child reads that stupid order. Reads it again. Looks up at him. Kazuya can feel him staring at him, but he can't quite bring his eyes upward. Kazuya instead slowly picks up a bit of soup so he has an excuse to look somewhere else, but he can't bring it to his lips, so he just lets it drop, and he watches the liquid running back into the bowl.

"Kazuya..." Jun whispers. And he knows she wants him to look up and he can't, he can't, not for a solid minute, until finally the boy makes a funny noise and he's startled into doing it.

And the boy...Looks every bit as shocked as the mother.

"You..." Jin swivels toward him as if he can tell when Kazuya's got his eyes on him. "You...Why?! Why now?!" It is not said out of anger. Rather, bafflement.

Better late than never, he thinks, but he can't quite answer the question. He should have done it twenty-two years ago. And even if he hadn’t been able to win that fight, well, then he should have done it two years ago. But it had been easier not to, when the first words out of the boys mouth had been how the world would be so much better if only Kazuya hadn't been in it. Easier to just pretend Jin wasn't... That Jin didn't have his half his blood, and, so much worse, half hers, too.

"Kazuya, your son asked you a question..." Jun says, trying to keep the conversation going, and he gives her a little glare, because he doesn't have an answer. He doesn't. Because I was afraid to. Because I knew it would burden you. Because I knew you didn't want it. Because I didn't know if you were strong enough to deserve it. Because my father burdened me with this and maybe it was better if you didn't inherit that lousy reward. Because I thought it was too late. Because you hated me. Because. Because. Because.

"As I...said..." The words are so fucking heavy in his throat. He is trying to force up a reason, maybe even a true one, and the words come so slow to him. They always have. But this hurts, and he is forcing himself to do it anyway, and both these Kazamas are just staring at him so unbearably he wishes he could turn his own laser on himself.  "Because..."

Jun smiles at him, and she might as well strangle him. It would be a mercy. "I have...been..."

He cannot talk, he cannot, and these Kazamas, these fucking Kazamas... He sighs. Looks up. Tries to force it out. "In your...shoes. I know...it can be complicated. This will allow you to inherit...everything that I have ever..." His throat closes up; he looks away.

"You.." He closes his eyes. "I know you don't want the Mishima name. But you might...need it...someday... You...should have the option of having it. You are strong enough to have it. And I do not mind...if it is known, that you are my..."

The word son will not leave his mouth. He tries three times—there is no forcing it out. There is only silence.  His mouth opens, and it will not come. The word is too powerful and means too much.

"I..." He doesn't know how to say that if he has to die, he wants the boy to have a clearer path. Not to sit in a room with a dozen lawyers like he did, arguing about whether his father's estate should be placed in escrow—though the boy will have it easier there, given that he'll let Jin finish him in the ring. He won’t be “missing”, he will be dead. And no one will prosecute the boy for it. If anything, they'll throw him a parade. The conquering hero. And with this paperwork, he can inherit his demon father's estate immediately; no lawyers beyond the necessary paperwork. He wants Jin to have that much.

"I..." Jin starts, then fades. "I...uhm..." He scratches his neck, and looks away; that truly is genetic, and Kazuya can't decide whether he's relieved about it or annoyed. Creating this bastard boy was his greatest mistake, without question, and yet he cannot find himself feeling anything but a weird sense of pity for the child when he sees how this kid struggles with all the things he himself has. And then he feels annoyed at that, because he doesn't like feeling those kinds of emotions, he doesn't like feeling pity, and, anyway, Jin doesn't have the excuse of a horrific childhood to explain his steel-trap mouth, the way Kazuya does. Jin was blessed with a parent who loved him and could actually talk to him. The greatest mother Kazuya could give him. So what did he ever have to feel so sad about?

He folds his arms and just stares at the boy, waiting for him to say what he will or will not.

"It's..." Jin just looks down, his look stressed. "I don't—"

"I know you don't want it now," he spits. "I know you don't want to be thought of as a Mishima, as mine—”

"Let him talk, Kazuya," Jun says softly, and he bristles, but he listens. He just glares at the boy instead.

"No, it's just...I don't know what to...say..." Jin looks down. "…You aren't acting like you think you'll win tomorrow."

"No," He says, softly. "Part of being an adult is to be prepared for the future. Even futures we don't particularly want. I never wanted..." He looks away. He doesn't know how to say it. "I didn't want you to...to...."

He looks away, into the cloudy soup, sees only his own cloudy image back. Startling to see both eyes brown, though, after all this time. He had nearly forgotten. He sighs. Fuck it.

"To struggle through...this..." He gestures with one hand outwards as if that can explain just what this entails. His powers. This pointless power struggle. The Mishima blood. The Hachijo curse. The—everything. Everything.

It truly would have been better for the kid if he didn't know Kazuya existed, he thinks. Maybe he would have been happier then. Maybe it would have been easier if Kazuya could have just stayed at a distance, just watched him from far away where he couldn’t hurt the boy—but Kazama would never grant him that... He sighs.

Jun places her hand on his, and he realizes with a shock that the boy has not said no.

"I plan on announcing...before the match, tomorrow. So there's no doubt that order will come from me..." He says softly. Jun squeezes his hand, and Jin nods.

"Okay," Jin says quietly. "I...Okay."

And it is not thank you, but it is not absolutely not a fight, and Kazuya does not know what to do with that.

He has never thought of a way this would go that didn’t involve them fighting.

"I...I have to apologize, too," Jun says, and he frowns, looking at her. "I always thought our children would grow up knowing that...they were not alone in that world. That we could help them grow in their powers in all the ways that neither you nor I had, growing up. And we…couldn’t do that..." She looked up at Jin, with nothing but pity in her eyes. "I am sorry. I never wanted you to feel so alone. To struggle, as your father and I struggled. It hurts my heart, Jin, to think of it. That you came into those powers alone. That you struggled so long, feared such rejection."

"It wasn't your fault," he admits, roughly. "It just...worked out that way." But it was his, certainly; he's not helped the boy, not at all. Not that the boy would accept it if he even tried.

And then, they are all silent at that. So many roads. Never once have they traveled the paths they all would have wanted. Does it even matter, in the end, that they wanted it?

Jun just sighs and looks down. "I am...sorry. It feels, sometimes, that our whole lives have had this sadness. Let us share some good memories together." She holds out a spoon of her food and gently holds it up to Jin.

"Do you know, Kazuya, I used to have to feed him like this because he was so picky as a baby? So fussy." Her eyes shine with a light that suggests she's poking fun at him, that that fussiness descends from Jin’s father. She’s probably right, but this is a bit funny. She hums and he realizes she is trying to play being an airplane. The spoon stays strong in her hand. "Mmm, mmm, here comes the delivery, straight from the mainland."

His heart squeezes a bit, looking at Jin's embarrassed face. Jin is mortified at this infantilization. "That was a long time ago, mom. I don't even remember that, I was a baby...."

"Indulge your mother in her silliness. I want to start at the beginning. There’ll be time to tell more tales."

She shoots him a little glance, and then another to Jin. Holds up her spoon. Jin sighs.

And then the spoon falls into the soup with a deafening splash, and she's gone. Just like that. No warning, no fading, just a total absence.

"Oh, mom…" The boy's voice sounds anguished, and he probably would too, if he could—could still express himself like that. But he can't.

"Dammit," he says softly under his breath, instead. 

And then she's back, blinking and confused. "I'm—I'm sorry. I thought I’d have more time to…”

"Don't—" he says, and he's not sure if he means don't do that to me, or if he means don't apologize, but it's somehow both and neither all at once and all he can do is stare into his soup before pushing it away. He can't eat anymore. Instead, he just shifts a little closer to her.

"Can you take some of my....power? To sustain you?"

He wouldn't offer for anyone else. But hell, if he's dying in the ring tomorrow, he doesn't need to save his powers for once, and truth is, he'd rather preserve her, rather have the time with her. And if he had more time to process that, he would find it absolutely terrifying.

But he knows, so well, that he does not. So instead, he looks at her, soft, and the look back is no less loving, and he wishes...he wish they had more time. Him. Her. Both. His hand goes around her waist, and she leans into him, half in his lap now.

"You can take from me, too," Jin murmurs, and Kazuya shakes his head, gently brushes her hair. No, let it be him. He's already in a sacrificial mood for one Kazama, might as well complete the set.

"You might need your powers yet," he says, looking at the boy, and the boy just looks at him with the most frustrated little expression. Then Jin looks down. Into the soup. Which he is also not eating.

He's really wasted his money on that. Oh well. Not like he'll need that in a few hours either. He laughs mirthlessly, then feels her hand on his chest, gently tapping into his power. "There you go," he murmurs. "Take it."

A nod into his chest, but she's gotten quieter. He thinks the last disappearance and reappearance really cost her. Or maybe she just likes...being in his arms. He wants it to be the latter. He is sure it is the former.

"Thanks for...sharing this," Jin says, and his voice sounds no less strangled than his father's when it comes to things like this. "The food, giving me your…” As he cannot say son, the boy cannot say name. He takes no offense, for once. He knows what the boy means. Jin pauses a minute, blinks back a tear. “Getting to…see...Mom. Share…memories. I'm glad I got to see you again mom and that I can tell you I…I love you."

And they all know that’s a goodbye in all but name.

They’re all quiet again a long moment after that. Jun, he knows, wants to say it back, but she can’t talk a lot, it seems. He brushes at her hair with one hand while she pulls his power with the other; she is drawing a lot. He’ll be exhausted by the time this is done.

And he doesn’t care.

“I…love…you…too…” She says, it is coming out in shorter breaths now. He wishes her fall-off had been slower; it’s harder to deal with this, this sudden forcing of a goodbye he doesn’t want to give. He wanted her to go through her memories, to tell him about Jin beyond being a fussy baby, and now it’s just – gone, that whole opportunity.  

And he’ll never get to ask.

His mouth twitches, and he wants to be able to talk, to say it, and he can’t, just now. He can’t. He strokes her hair and he hopes she understands and he hates himself both because he cannot say it and because he does not feel like he should feel it.

“You…too,” she says, turning her tired eyes toward him. He nods toward her, a rough jerk of his head but it’s what he can manage in this moment. He presses her tighter to his chest, knowing he is robbing Jin a bit of time with his mother but so be it. The boy had 15 years with her; he has had a few months at best with the love of his life, and they were few indeed. He’ll be selfish now and press her into his arms for a moment. He finds himself unable to stop holding her tight against him. His chest shakes but nothing comes out, he just holds her tight for a very long moment before pulling back.

He glances back at Jin, who—understands. He can see by the boy’s miserable eyes. Her eyes. He does not particularly like that the boy understands his sadness. He knows this is a show of weakness and he fights the urge to snarl something nasty, to toss an insult to the boy so he doesn’t realize the sheer depth of his pain.

But that would hurt her, so he doesn’t. He just gives the boy a nod. He doesn't really want to talk about his vulnerabilities with the boy, even if, in this case, it is a shared one. "I can't imagine what you thought when you got that invitation,” he mumbles, wanting desperately to talk about anything that isn’t—isn’t the pain they’re all going through now.

Jin seems almost relieved at the topic change, and Jun just breathes deeply in his arms. Her eyes are half-closed now, but she seems to be fighting to keep them open.

"I thought you just couldn't wait, to be honest. Or maybe you wanted to kill me without the cameras watching." Jin gives him a little half-smirk, and he can’t help but return it for a moment. Yeah, that’s how a father and son match among Mishimas goes, doesn’t it? They both know the script.  

He looks down into Jun's hair; soft and raven-black as it always was. She's still breathing against his chest, or whatever the psychic projection equivalent of breathing is. Her fingers grip him a little tighter; he grips her a little tighter in return. He laughs, but there's no pleasure in it.

"I can see where you got that impression....son." The word tastes foreign on his tongue, but this time, he forces it through and hears Jun gasp into his chest. "But I'm glad you...came."

Jun smiles and pulls herself more into his chest; she is fading more, he thinks, even with his power augmenting hers. And this time...she probably won't be able to come back.

"I'm...so…happy..." She murmurs. "You called him...your...son...." 

"He always was, you stupid woman," he mutters, his own voice choked up. Doesn't she know why he couldn’t say it? Doesn't she...know, why he's avoided so many thoughts of this stupid boy?  "Always...our…." He can't...say any more. The rest of that sentence just dies in his throat.

But from her little tired smile, it's enough.

"Still...happy. Take the...compliment." She sounds almost asleep now, and his heart hurts. She is fading so fast now, and he is struggling. He doesn't want to be here without here. He doesn't want to live on this decrepit rock without her.

It terrifies him, those feelings.

"Mom!" Jin rushes over to his mother's side; to his surprise, Jin quickly grabs his mother's other wrist and pulls it to his own chest, mimicking Kazuya's action. The boy is trying very hard to help her.

It is breaking the last remnants of his heart. Just a little bit.

"Mom..."

Jun just smiles weakly at him, then cranes her neck to look at him too. Something wet falls on her, a tear—his? The boy’s? He can't tell.

Oh, this hurts. Kazuya has endured a lot of pain in his life, and somehow, Jun Kazama has managed to make it to two of his most painful days. Only Heihachi can beat her record, but at least Kazama has given him the best days of his life, too.

His heart feels like it is breaking in twain, the pain so bad. And to think before his evening, he would have doubted that he had one. How she messes his life up, this Jun Kazama. He doesn’t know if he means that affectionately or not, but he does love the woman, and it hurts to watch her like this.

But he can’t look away.

Jin is pulling his mother's other hand to his chest, moving her hand on him to emulate her hand on Kazuya. "Mom. Pull from me, too. Please."

She wavers a bit; he can see from a flash of an expression on her face that she knows it won't help. "Try," Kazuya murmurs, but his voice sounds choked up and sad, even to his own ears.

"Please," Jin says, sounding desperate. "Please. Try to hold on."

Jun winces but does as the child asks; he feels an increased draw on his end as well. "That's it," he murmurs, and wonders when he became a man so comfortable with the idea of sharing his power. Maybe it is because she is so strong, in his mind. She is so strong it...doesn't seem like he is throwing it away, giving it to her.

The boy pales a bit too; she is drawing from them both now and still, he thinks, it might not be enough.

"I..." He wants to say a hundred things, he can say none. I love you. Don't leave us. We need you. "Jun..." He can barely get her name out. Her head turns toward him, and the expression is no less mysterious and benevolent than it always has been.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs. "I don't want to cause trouble."

"You always cause me trouble," he mumbles, the complaining an old defense mechanism, and he is—shit, his voice is falling apart. He is...There's something wet at his eye and he has to slap it away. It's not a tear. It's not a tear.

It's...absolutely a tear. Fuck. Oh, god, Jun. What she does to him.

"Mom..." Jin sounds no less choked up, and he is pretty sure the boy actually is crying. "Stay with us, please."

"I'm...trying, but it's not..." She swallows; there's tears in her eyes too. "It was nice. To see you together; it was nice. I'm so happy we got to be together, even if just..."

Her voice is so light, her body so light. She is fading away. He is losing her and she is fading away. And once again, he can do nothing. As horrifically final as the volcano and waking up a continent away, in a new and emptier life.

“Don’t say goodbye, mom,” Jin says, and his voice is so sad. So, so sad. Oh god.

"Where are you?" He demands, his voice rough. "Tell me what you see, Jun. Something. Anything." Give us a clue. Give us something. Give me a miracle, Miracle Kazama.

"My...I..." A soft sigh; the power draw gets heavier, and he feels it, but he just lets her take it. "I see...dark. quiet. Stone Walls. Growing...vines. Tree. Red marks. It's...ancient. I don't know the sign, but it's...I feel it...powerful…old…"

"Tree.." Jin whispers. "Stone? Red marks?"

"It...Sacred..." She murmurs, and makes an odd noise, one of pain. "Hurts. Hurts to open eyes. I want—want to be here. Can't do both."

"Then stay here," he whispers softly, and folds his arms around her back, holding her by her stomach, as if he can anchor her to him. He knows it won't do a damn bit of good, but he has to try. Jin has shifted to hugging her in front, his arms around her shoulders, and they really are embracing now, if only through her. They are touching, though; he feels the boy’s body against his arms, and he doesn’t turn away, and neither does Jin.

She makes a tiny sobbing noise; so does Jin. He would too, if he could.

"Jin..." Her voice is soft and quiet. "Jin. I love you. My son. My baby." Her voice is breaking. "Remember what I taught you. And remember that—I'm sorry that—"

"Please, mom," Jin says, his voice is no less strangled than Kazuya's own. God, they are both miserable at this. Too much of him in this boy.

"...That you were...alone, so long. You father and I...both sorry." He closes his eyes and looks away; how stupid. She's ...she's almost gone and she's apologizing for him.

Stupid woman, stupid stupid fucking woman!

God, she's leaving them. Again.

And maybe he won't admit it, but a few tears run down his cheeks too. Such a stupid family. Such a stupid, stupid, stupid family. All of this. So god damn stupid. He wishes he didn't love either of these idiot Kazamas. If all he cared about was ruling the world, he could look forward to tomorrow, instead of being horribly aware that the light of the morning is chasing the darkness away and with it the last hours of his life.

And hers.

"Kazuya-san, I'm sorry...I don't think I'll be able to watch your match." And she sounds so sad of it, like it's the worst she's hurt him, even though it isn't, even though he would give anything to keep her here. She sounds so fucking remorseful and it's driving him insane.

"God dammit woman, you think I care about that right now?!" The anger, at least, comes out easy. "I don't," he says, and that is harder to say. It hurts. "I don't."

"We'll...find...each other,”  She says. He closes his eyes. "If not in this life..."

She fades out, but he cannot finish the sentence. It is too awful to say, and too comforting not to. That is them in a nutshell, is it not? Life and death, good and evil, compassion and vengeance; always contrasts, him and her.

"If I can't...be...with you...I'll wait for you," she murmurs, barely audible, only to him. "By the last river, if..."

"And I you," he says. "We walk into that next life together." A vow: he gives so few of them he knows when he's uttered one and just how serious it is.

"For the all days we couldn't walk in this life," she whispers, getting her strength back for just a second, and it is a promise, and it's so fucking poetic that even his coal-black soul is genuinely moved by it, even after all these years, and he presses his head into her little neck and breathes deep because he'll be damned if he shows his son how affected he was by that, be damned if he lets him hear the soft sob he makes into her little neck.

"Longer," he gets out in a whisper, but just barely. He's not the wordsmith she is. But it's enough. She leans to the side and presses a kiss to his lips, and then he sees her move to Jin and kiss his forehead and then her form is wavering and he catches her lips mouth the words I love but there's no sound, and then she winks out and then she's gone and then he's holding nothing and has nothing but this stupid, scared child in front of him that he has never been a parent to, never even once, but it's clear his son, even if he is a fully grown adult – Jin needs a parent so badly right now.

Jin looks at him with an expression of such deep and profound sadness that he knows he is mirroring, and then Jin cries, and he just watches the boy, and he feels so useless, because for all his power, he can do nothing.

And they are just two men who badly, badly miss the woman they both love, if in very different ways.

"Oh god," Jin mutters softly. "Oh god. I didn't think it could hurt this much the second—"

"Yeah," he says, shakily, and that's not much comfort, but maybe it doesn't need to be, because Jin inches a  step forward and he does too and they're...almost leaning on one other. He's not...entirely sure how that happens, only that he finds Jin's wet face on his shoulder. He tenses when it happens - his father would have knocked him away for even trying this, and probably beat him bloody on top of it all.

But he is not his father. Not a better person, but not quite the same as his father in this one department. Heihachi always had the charm to have multiple families; he is deficient in that. There will be no other Miracle Kazama. This boy is the only child he'll ever have. His only legacy. 

It is a bittersweet one to leave.  They have managed to miss one another almost entirely in their walks through life, him and the boy. The boy will never learn his variant of Mishima-ryu, always Heihachi's, not that the boy uses it anyway, so perhaps a moot point. But it's sad to think his own mother's style will die with him tomorrow. Today? He blinks.

He doesn't know. And it doesn't matter. He has fought tooth and nail to not get attached to this strange child, and at the end of all things—it's a regret that he did not know him as he should have. And so, he lets the boy sob, even if the stupid tears are absolutely going to stain Kazuya's vest. He’s too close for those tears not to hit him. But it doesn't matter. He has many, and he's missed the boy's entire childhood full of, no doubt, projectile spitting of various substances. He can let him have this one comfort at the cost of one vest.

He can't quite bring himself to return the ...affection, though, and he knows he is failing on comforting the child. He does not say it's alright because he knows it is not alright. Better than just about anyone else on this miserable rock, he understands what it is to be a boy who has just lost the one parent who cared about him, who cared for him, and he knows how horrible it feels to be left with a monster who has done nothing but be an obstacle. He does not imagine it is much easier at Jin's age than it was at his own when it happened.

He closes his eyes and puts his head down on the boy's shoulder and lets his own shoulders shudder. He's not crying. He's not.

"God..." Jin keeps saying that, as if they are creatures who have any sway to pull from the heavenly side of the celestial divide. "God, it hurts. Fuck."

"Yeah." He agrees, his head close to the boy's shoulder. His voice sounds rough, even to his own ears. He's not crying, and it's taking every last bit of his infamous bit of control to do it, but he's not.

But his heart hurts all the same.

"Father," Jin mutters. "How do we...?"

He freezes, unsure of what to say. Jin's never even called him that before. He's not sure Jin realizes that he's called him father now. He wonders if Jin thinks of him as his father in his head; he did the same to Heihachi, if so. Thought of him as his father, but never voiced it- always oyagi, always Heihachi; never father. Not once. Words have power, and he'd always known that.

But Jin has...called him father. Out loud and everything. Father. To. Him.

His mind...reels.

"I don't..." He doesn't know what to say. "I don't know."

Jin pretty much collapses on top of him; he doesn't quite know what to do. He just stares over the boy's shoulder, at a kitchenette filled with broken glass and a damp floor and not much else. 

He needs to...He doesn't know what to do. It doesn't matter, he supposes. His child, this young man in front of him, will murder him in a few hours. And while he doesn't look forward to that ignoble death for a second time, he at least has the advantage that when he wakes up, he'll be with the woman he loves.

Jin...will just be an orphan. And who knows better the complicated feeling of being a self-imposed orphan than him?

"Jin..." He murmurs the boy’s name; it still feels strange on his tongue. He avoids talking about him, talking to him for a reason. Words have power. The boy pulls back, his eyes questioning his. Her eyes. His son has her stupid brown eyes and Jin is looking at him with an expression that isn't hatred for once; just mourning, mourning.

It's...worse, honestly.

Slowly, so slowly he's pretty sure Jin ages another year in the time it takes him to do it, he shakily moves his hand to the boys shoulder. It's....not quite a hug. He doesn't know how to do that, not really, not without Jun. But the boy seems to know he means it as a comfort. He leans into the touch, and they just stare at one another, utterly miserable.

Finally, it's Jin that turns away.

"I'm glad I got to see her, but I..." He sighed. "Everything is so much more complicated now."

"It was always complicated." It was. But neither of them wanted to see it before. "Your mother has a true gift for making things that way."

"Yeah," Jin says softly. "Yeah."

His own son, isn't he, this child? Barely able to give his father a damn word. A Mishima to the fucking core. Poor little bastard boy. His poor little bastard boy. His boy.

Fuck.

"Jin..." He whispers, this, and can only whisper this. "Jin..." He has to look away. "After the fight, there's...some papers in my nightstand. For you. Last..." He dies out. It's not quite a will and testament, is it? Not quite anything but some mad desperate notes. But in Kazuya's hardscrabble life, that will have to do.

He had less from his parents, anyway.

Jin just freezes up, saying nothing. After a long moment he turns back and looks at him and shakes his head.

"I don't want to fight you anymore," Jin mutters. "I can't...Mom...If killing you means…she’ll die…” He can tell Jin has put two and two together from the last few moments of his conversation with the mother; he’s a clever kid. He supposes it makes sense. Kazama was a damn smart woman.  He has his own moments of brilliance.

"She's..." He doesn't know what to say in response. She is gone? He isn't sure. She's...somewhere. Somewhere that might as well be nowhere. "I don't..."

He stares at the boy and wishes he could speak. He breathes deeply once, twice. It's so hard. So hard to breathe, so hard to talk to this stupid child. His child.

His stupid, stupid, stupid-if-yes-exceptionally-bright child.

"I don't want to f..." He manages to get out, and it's enough, because Jin is his mother's son in as much as he is miserably his, and Jin pulls him closer, holding him in what is possibly a hug even if Kazuya’s brain refuses to register it, but then this hands slip and maybe—maybe he is holding the boy, too, even if his hands are literally shaking with the effort it takes him.

Pathetic! Heihachi's voice rings out in his ears. A Mishima—

Fuck it. He is a Mishima but he is not his father, he is not his father. And his father is dead. He made him so. What proof of true strength is there, if not that? Kazuya has proved himself the better; he can enforce his will. He pushes Heihachi's ghost down into the depths of the hell that is his miserable speck of a soul.

He wraps his arms around this impossible child, feels the demon in his heart start to re-awaken, to want to fight for glorious reclamation of the whole, and he just...forces himself not to listen. For her, he will ignore it. He will allow himself to never be whole. Doesn't matter now. Doesn't matter now.

"This is so fucking weird," Jin mutters in his ear. "Do you feel...?"

"Yeah," he admits.

"And you're not gonna...?"

"No." He is sad about it. He misses having the full powers he once had. But... he can't. Killing the boy will kill her as easily as Jin killing him will. Somehow, he knows this to be true, though he’s never been a psychic on Jun’s level.

"I'm not gonna either." Jin closes his eyes and breathes deep, and he thinks the boy is trying to control it. It will be difficult for him. The boy's ability to control it is so much lesser. "I don't want..."

But they could... he swallows. He fingers his hands on the boy's shoulder tightening. "You won't. I'll...show you. How to keep control."

The boy nods and swallows himself, and they sit like that in silence for ...time. He isn't aware how long. It could be five minutes, it could be twenty. It feels endless.

"I'd like that," Jin finally says, and then it’s his turn to nod and sit and try to wonder how to explain something that is so impossible to put into words.

"Kazuya..." Jin asks, slowly. He's recovering now; no more father. "Mom, what she saw...Do you think we could find her based on that?"

He shakes his head. "It could be anywhere. And she was…I don’t think she had much left to give. Her power felt like it was…" Running out. The words fall in his mouth, but he feels Jin stiffen up and he knows that the boy understands what he was saying.

One way or another, her time is running out without rescue.  

There's another long pause in the conversation, and finally Jin tightens up in his shoulders and looks at him, and he sees, now, how Jin has that bit of body language from his mother. He gives his father a steely little hero glare, and Kazuya thinks that looks awful odd on a face that is almost a mirror to his own. There's another long pause. Then Jin says: "Then...We should start looking right now."

Jin looks at him. And he looks at Jin.

And he feels, suddenly, so god damn stupid that he hasn't thought of that himself. He tilts his head and looks at the boy. The boy looks back.

"How can you possibly think...?" He asks, and it comes out heated, because the idea that maybe they could find her, in person find her, in the scant time they have left - it feels impossible. 

"I think we can try," Jin says. "We've never tried together. Maybe that's—maybe that's what we need to do."

He looks at the boy. Weighs his options. Decides that even though it is likely to prove fruitless, he would rather be spending time with his child searching for her rather than sitting on that miserable bed waiting for death in a duel neither of them wants. The odds of success are low, but they're not nothing.

And he knows they would make her very happy indeed if - if they found her. Together.

"Do you think she got off of Yakushima?" It seems impossible she could be there, and they have not found her. He knows that Jin has looked as often as he has.

Jin shakes his head. "I don't know. I don't think..." He sighs. "She must be, right?"

He doesn't know. He doesn't.

"I don't know."  He sighs. "But we have both looked for her a lot there."

"I grew up there. But I haven't put my feet on the ground there in a long time and I keep thinking..." He frowned. "I—she said...said a tree, red writing, sacred...there's only one place I can think of that fits that. The Kazama shrine on Yakushima, but...we'll need both of us to break the seals to get in there, it's not easy. I've never even been there with mom. It's been locked away for centuries. I don't...I didn't think mom could even get inside."  Quietly, he looks down. “I’m not sure I can, either, but…”

"Oh?" He can barely breathe. It's all he can get out. This stupid boy. This stupid boy is giving him something so dangerous: hope. He doesn't want to believe. It's foolish. It can only hurt him.

But the boy is in right next to him, an arm's length away, and they're not—they're not fighting. As the boy’s mother would say, miracles are long-shots.

But what are they, if not a family of long-shots? They've all cheated death once. Maybe together, they can help her beat it twice.  

"I don't..." Jin frowns. "I'm not sure, but..."

"It's the only lead we have." He stands; the boy is right. He brushes off his face, and stares at the kitchen, with all its broken glass. It's going to mean walking away. It's going to mean letting fucking Paul Phoenix fight in the tournament final. But it feels...right. Maybe. To walk away.

Even if the thought of it is terrifying.

"If we leave now, we can reach Yakushima by morning." He tries to summon the power; harder without the hatred, the existential threat to his survival, but it comes, even if it comes a bit slow. He lets the wings spread and looks back at Jin. Jin who is still sitting down and still quite human looking.

"So, is that a yes? ...What happened to your idea of the final fight being inevitable?" Jin asks. He looks away. He knows the boy is testing him, making sure this isn’t a trap. He cannot blame him. He has not earned the boy’s trust.  

"Neither of us could walk away if the other remained standing in opposition." He closes his eyes, and smirks. "But maybe—maybe both of us could..." It will be, he suspects, only a temporary ceasefire. He and the boy still want very different things. The boy has all his little rebel army friends to keep happy, and Kazuya has—Kazuya has nothing but the power he can wield. Sooner or later, the conflict will rise again.

It is inevitable with Mishima blood.

But...that is not to say that Mishimas cannot, on occasion, work together, especially if it is in pursuit of a higher power. And what higher power—what higher strength—has their universe ever had, if not her? What higher power has ever terrified him? Only her. 

"...Both of us can, yeah." Jin stands up and hands back his written out order to him. "...You can have that back, I guess."

He takes it back from the boy but catches the little hesitance in Jin's eyes as he takes it. He swallows, then walks over to the outside line, hitting the button for Nina.

"...Yes?" Nina's frosty voice comes over the line. "I assume you're going to want a team to take away the body?"

"...No. I've got to leave for a ...few hours. There's an order sitting on my bed. See that it gets announced tomorrow morning, will you?"

A long pause; it's an unusual ask. But Nina isn't the type to ask questions about an order. "...Alright. First light, I assume?"

"Yes." He leaves it at that and turns back to Jin.

"Huh," Jin says. 

"It's done," he says. Then he looks at the boy, and at his thin jacket, and thinks: it's going to be colder in Japan. He frowns and walks over to his closet, as if this is the most normal thing in the world: a demon pulling out a second coat from his closet and handing it to his son. "Here. It's.."

"Are you seriously going to tell me it's cold and I need a jacket?" Jin says, looking at him. He just smirks and hands the coat over. Jin doesn't argue, and puts it around his shoulders, then hesitates.

"If I transform, it'll...ruin your--"

"You are forgetting who the coat was cut for," he mutters; Jin's feather wings won't take up any more space than his leathery ones. He smooths down the coat on Jin's shoulders; it looks...strange. He does not think this strange alliance will get less strange with time.

But he’s saved from his doubts that that thought brings up, because at that very moment, his door opens. Both he and Jin's head whirl toward it, and he cannot possibly imagine who it is. Perhaps Nina, come to get his order, and perhaps for one vain second he hopes it is somehow her, but it is neither.

"I forgot, your bill—" Ganryu pokes his head in the room, and what he sees is a demon father smoothing his son's shoulders down in what neither one of them is gonna recognize as a shred of paternal—

There's a laser suddenly shooting toward Ganryu, and, it's not his, and he turns in surprise as he watches a still-transforming Jin laser the poor sumo right back into the hallway.

"Charge it!" Kazuya hollers. Ganryu does not come back in, though he can hear the man groaning in the hallway. He flies forward and locks the door, then turns back to Jin who hasn't attacked him...but doesn't look entirely there, either. Two expressions seem to dueling for control of the man's face: a pleased expression that surely belongs to the demonic side, and one of some regret—ah, that's the Kazama influence.

"It had to be done," Kazuya says. They might not have time for Jin's guilt trip.  "We don't have time to waste on explaining this to that jabbering fool."

Jin lifts his head and gives him a smile that is not his son's, not entirely: Jin turns back to him, visibly trying not to smirk, and he sighs. Jin is so shockingly terrible at this. It's embarrassing, as a demon himself. He never struggled with this the way the boy does.

"Wrest control," he mutters. "Don't let it subsume you. Grab the power back." Easier said than done, but neither of them are going to get out of this room without a protracted battle if he can't do it. And they really don't have time for that.

Jin moves toward him, one hand held open, and he steps back, shifting into stance…and then the hand goes down.

"My - I? I think I...got...it?" He looks at his talon-esque hands, then back toward Kazuya. And this look is more the boy's own; he's successfully gotten it put down, for the moment. Kazuya knows it won't be the only time that he will need to keep focus, and that the odds of the boy managing to keep focus all the way to Yakushima are slim.

But he has to—he has to try. For her. For her he has to try. That's just the way it is.

"Good," he says, though it's hard to offer a compliment as a Mishima. But he forces the single word out, and then before he can think about that too much, he's jumping off the veranda, and taking flight, and stretching his wings out in the evening air. Jin follows quickly behind him, and he can feel the boy flying at his side.

And it's...weird.

But it's not...bad? He smiles, but keeps his head turned where the boy won't see it. A Mishima is never soft, after all.

Neither of them talks very much; neither of them, he suspects, ever was much of a talker. And there's something about words that can get them both in trouble, so he's content to just fly with Jin, over river and valley, desert and sand, and keep his attention mostly on whether Jin will attack him on not. But Jin does not.

"Do you think we'll find her in time? If feels like it would take a miracle." Jin, he suspects, doesn't believe in  miracles any more than he did. He closes his eyes, thinks of her, and takes a deep breathe.

Miracles are long shots.

But that doesn't mean they don't happen.

"If anyone can, it's us," he says, which isn't much, but it has to be enough. It has to be enough. Jin nods; he can tell the boy is trying to believe.

And maybe that's enough.

Kazuya Mishima closes his eyes and hopes for Miracle Kazama to have one more miracle in her, just this once. To hold out just that little bit longer.

The funny thing is—he believes in her enough that he thinks she does.

He doesn't know what the future will bring them, any permutation of them: him and the boy, the boy and the mother, him and her.

But for the first time—in a very, very, very long time - Kazuya actually hopes to find out.